The practitioner bookshop wasn’t far from the church district. It was called Barley and Daughters, and the carved wooden letters affixed to the brick wall over the entrance were framed with thick glass globes that shone a cold white as the sun set and the buildings across the street cast their shadows long. For a while, Kalen just stood there staring at it. He was nearly overcome with hope and fear and longing.

What if everything he wanted was in there? What if nothing was? What if it was there, but he couldn’t have it?

Through the large windows with their small bubbled panes, he could see so many books.

He’d always thought it was funny that Lander couldn’t bring himself to walk up to girls and say he liked them once he’d decided that he did. Now, he could understand. The pressure of approaching the store and learning…whatever it was you learned in bookshops full of magical texts. He’d never been to one; he didn’t know. But the feeling was immense.

He worked up his courage and approached the green-painted door. A bell clinked as he stepped inside and took a deep breath of air that smelled like leather, ink, and paper. The store was lit by more of the same glass globes that decorated the sign outside. The light wasn’t like fire. It was more like the sun crystals from the pig barn. Bright, clean, and clear.

There were three people in the room, and the thump of footsteps above indicated more upstairs. A woman in a kirtle stood on a ladder, running a dust cloth over a high shelf. A young man was by the windows, carefully going over a line of runes around the frame with sharp-smelling paint. And a brunette woman, round-cheeked and wearing a white smock over her dress, looked over her shoulder and smiled as Kalen entered.

“Hello!” she said, setting a pot of glue and a brush on a table where some kind of book repair work seemed to be in progress. “Are you the one coming to pick up the order for Clywing? Father finished the spells on the bindings yesterday. Let me—”

“I’m…I’m here to buy a book,” Kalen said. “A spell book. Please.”

The woman on the ladder and the man with the paint both glanced toward him. He was holding his breath for some reason. Maybe it was because he was half sure they were going to say, “No. No books for you, Kalen. We don’t sell them to Masterless children who’ve never set foot in such a nice shop before.”

But the woman in the smock only looked him up and down once. “For yourself?” she asked. “Or are you on an errand?”

“For me.”

“What are you looking for?”

Kalen stared at her. His mind went blank. He couldn’t think of the title of a single book, and he couldn’t remember what it was he thought he wanted in a place like this.

“Maybe you want to study for winter Entrance at the Enclave?” she suggested when he remained silent. “We have a couple of the common beginner manuals. Water, Earth, Flora, and…oh, Moss, did we sell the last copy of Sigerismo, Volume 1 again?”

She looked back at Kalen. “It’s good to study that one if you’re hoping to be taken in for training by the livestock management wing. It always goes over well during the interview process.”

Enclave. Livestock. Sigerismo. The familiar name triggered something, and Kalen finally found his wits.

“I would like to purchase a wind magic text of some kind,” he said in a rush. “One for magicians. Or maybe two. But if you don’t have any for magicians then I’ll take any level if the patterns aren’t too complex. And Sigerismo, Volume 1 would be good. But not for livestock. I have the twelfth volume already and that’s just too difficult for me right now. And some other books…can I look inside all of them first and see what they’re about, or is that not allowed? I’ll be very careful. And whatever reagents I might need for the spells in the wind magic book. And I need to know where to find a good healer and how much their services might cost, and—”

“Wait!” said the woman, holding up a hand. “If your list is that long, let’s start over. Welcome to Barley and Daughters, the best booksellers and traders in all of Circon, and the only ones in Granslip Port. I’m High Magician Lily Acress, one of the Daughters. From the name. You are?”

“Nerth,” said Kalen, reminding himself about the accent. He had been planning to debut it here, in a place where he and Yarda would not be seen together. But then he’d gotten overwhelmed. “From Tiriswaith.”

“Did your voice just change Nerth from Tiriswaith? Are your nerves that bad? Well..never mind. We have books. Do you have enough money to buy them?”

“I do.” I think. He was just guessing that he did, based on what the prices of all his old mismatched books had been. He certainly couldn’t turn over a “whole bag of gold” in exchange for a single spell as the enchanter couple from Elder Twin Island apparently had for Summon Blob. But he did have an amount that was supposed to last him for years. He could spend some of it.

“Then we’re practically cousins,” said Lily, leaning forward and holding out her hand. “Let me show you around.”

#

“First of all,” said Lily, pulling Kalen over to a shelf in the back corner of the room, “why do you need a healer? And is it catching?”

“It’s for my relative. We’re traveling together, and she has a bad heart.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she said in a voice that was a little too brisk and businesslike to actually sound sorry. “How do you know her heart is bad?”

“A sorcerer told her so last year. She couldn’t fix it, so she said my relative needed to travel to find help from a very good healer.”

He didn’t think he should mention the Archipelago by name after the interest it had caused at the Office of the Post.

Lily paused mid-stride to stare at him. “A sorcerer good enough to diagnose a heart condition sent her in search of a healer? That’s serious, then. You don’t want some potion or a quick patch-up from a magician. You want a real healer.”

“Is there one?” Kalen said worriedly. “In Granslip Port?”

“A few hours’ walk from here. At the Enclave. Low Sorcerer Nigel. You can’t buy his help, though.”

“I can save my money for—”

“No, I don’t mean you don’t have enough money. I mean the Acress Enclave doesn’t sell his healing services.”

“Acress? Like your name?”

“Just got into port, didn’t you? We’re the main practitioner clan in this region. My father didn’t like Enclave life, so he decided to run a store here in the city instead. But we’re family members in good standing.”

She resumed tugging him toward the shelves. “Our Enclave has branches dedicated to various magics that boost Circon’s agricultural production. So we have a wide variety of affinities under our roof, but our supply of healers is limited in comparison to the total number of family members. And we only have the one practicing at the sorcerer level. He’s a tremendously valuable resource. So…he’s not for sale.”

“But what if someone needs him badly?” Kalen protested.

She gave him a small smile. “The thing about excellent healers is that someone always needs them badly.”

“His friend can go on the compassion days,” the woman called Moss said, as she moved her ladder into a new position for dusting.

“I was just about to tell him that!” Lily said. “Every half month, on the sixteenth day and the thirty-second, some Enclave practitioners offer help to outsiders. For free. Including the healers. If your relative arrives well before dawn and can wait all day, she’ll probably be able to see someone. And if her problem is urgent, maybe Nigel himself will be available.”

Kalen heaved are relieved sigh. This was excellent news. One of the special days would be coming up before the week was out. And then there would be another and another.

No matter how long they stayed here, Yarda could keep going and visiting the healers at the Enclave. It wasn’t as good as Arlade meeting them, but it was much better than Kalen had feared.

“Now, books!” said Lily. She spun so quickly that some of her dark hair came loose from the clip holding it.

“You wanted ‘a wind magic text of some kind.’ For magicians. Or any level. One or two. I know a customer who’s eager to make a purchase when I meet one. Even if he is a little young and grubby. These…” She reached out to tap a small brass badge affixed to the bottom of the shelf in front of her. “These are for you.”

Kalen stared at the piece of brass. It had a rune etched on it instead of a word.

Does that mean wind?

He let his eyes roam over the leather-covered spines of the books. They were beautiful. And one end of the shelf held other things that were just as appealing—a trio of scroll cases, a pair of boxes with locks on them that looked like they might have been made to hold loose pages, a glassed-in cabinet full of folded sheets of silky fabric.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Kalen stood on his tiptoes and reached for a book the astonishing deep orange color of an egg yolk, and Lily cleared her throat. “Rules!” she said brightly.

Heart pounding, Kalen glanced toward her. She had just pulled a cloth out of the pocket of her smock.

“Clean your hands,” she said. “The books are all spelled against damage, but you never know. Yes, you can look through the shop and examine the books. No, you can’t copy anything from them. We’ll throw you out if you try it. Also, see the tags?”

While Kalen hastily rubbed his hands on the cloth, she pointed at the shelf. Every book had a single thread trapped between the pages and dangling over the spine. A small paper tag hung from the end.

“The price on the tag is the price of the book. We don’t haggle at Barley and Daughters. And no discounts. If you buy a dozen books, do you know what you get?”

Kalen shook his head.

“A dozen books.”

She grinned at him. She had very straight teeth. “If you’re carrying significantly more money than you look like you are, you can look at the books in the cellar room. If you need non-practitioner books, we have some upstairs. A few reagents there, too, though it’s not a large part of our business. If you would like recommendations from a knowledgable practitioner, you can ask me—”

“No, don’t ask her!” Moss called. “Ask me or my husband over there. Or father when he’s down here. Lily will have you convinced your career as a practitioner is over if you don’t buy every single thing in the place.”

“It certainly wouldn’t hurt you to do that,” Lily said shamelessly. “Anyway, the store officially closes at nightfall, but we never really close then because we all live in the back of the building here, and we just sit around studying when work is through. If you’re quiet, and tidy, and paying you can stay late.”

“I want to stay late,” Kalen said passing the cloth back to her.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

Humming, the woman headed back over to the table where she’d been working with a book and a jar of glue.

Calm down, Kalen told himself as he turned his attention back to the shelf. Don’t lose your head. Just look at the prices first and only consider the things you can afford.

The books on the shelf—a whole shelf!—Lily had presented to him were all so new. They looked like they’d never been touched by another human’s fingers. Only a few of them had words on the spine, so Kalen would have to open them one by one to read their titles and figure out what they were.

He slowly turned the price tags over so that he could see each one.

They were awful. Every single one made him want to curl up into a ball and cry at the unfairness of the world.

So this was why his family never brought him exactly the books he’d asked for. It was why so much of his precious collection was strange and antique. Am I a poor person?

He didn’t think so. He wasn’t by Hemarland standards. And he actually suspected, after seeing a bit more of the city, that he had lived a much nicer life than many of the people in Granslip Port.

Are practitioners all rich? Is this some kind of book shop for especially rich people?

Those two seemed more likely.

What must they keep in the cellar? Are the books there made of gold?

Kalen took a deep breath and made some adjustments to his fantastic dreams of walking out of the store with armfuls of knowledge. He did some math. He had to keep enough money to make it to the Archipelago on his own. He’d figured that price a dozen times on the ship on the way over. He ought to keep quite a bit more than that, though, in case of emergencies.

He mentally swept the largest portion of his fortune into a bag and tied it up tight. Assuming he was on his own as far as his education went, maybe even until the tournament more than three years from now, then…oh, it was hard. What sort of supplies would he need apart from the books?

He reached up for the first book. It had a dark brown cover with a silver spell diagram on the front, and the title on the first page said it was New Developments in Swift Wind Magery by Echune Batto. Kalen examined it thoroughly.

The developments were actually new, if the date below the title was right. The book had been written just ten years ago. And the mage level spells were definitely more complex than any he’d seen before. All of the patterns were much more difficult than anything he’d ever managed to cast.

But he loved this book. It was so thoughtfully put together. The casting notes for the spells were concise but thorough. He felt like he understood exactly what the author meant. And the spells…actually the spells weren’t quite as impressive as he would have imagined mage spells should be. It seemed more like they were designed to introduce uncommon ideas and techniques to someone who already had a repertoire of wind spells they could use. But they were still fascinating.

Kalen slid it back in place and carefully turned the tag back exactly the way he’d found it. He was not going to get thrown out of the shop for being untidy.

He went down the line, spending ages on each splendid manuscript. There were a couple more books full of mage level spells and several for mid-level and advanced magicians. Why are all the patterns so hard?

The people who worked in the shop didn’t bother him, though he did have the feeling he was being constantly watched.

Not this one, he thought, pushing the golden orange book into position sadly. It was all history and theory. What a shame that not a single spell was recorded in the prettiest book by far.

He glanced at the window and saw that it was completely dark out. He hadn’t even noticed thanks to the store’s bright lighting. He looked around and realized it was only him and Lily in the room. She’d taken up her sister’s dust cloth and started buffing the brass tags on all of the shelves with it, though judging by the smell of glue she’d still been working at the book repair table until recently.

He walked over to her.

“I’m going to buy a book,” he said.

“Glad to hear it.”

“Not today, though. I’m not done finding one.” He waited nervously. If she was going to get annoyed and not let him back in tomorrow, he’d pick one now. But he didn’t want to. He needed to figure some things out.

“See you tomorrow, Nerth.”

He nodded and hurried out the door.

#

Three nights later the shop bell chimed, and Moss stuck her head out of the back room to speak to her sister. “Ye, gods,” she said. “Is the little Tiriswaithan boy finally gone, Lily? He spent another whole day staring at that one shelf! At this rate, someone’s going to think we’ve mesmerized him and stuck him there as a decoration.”

“He’s gone. He didn’t buy anything yet,” her sister said, watching Kalen disappear down the street.

“I’d accuse him of trying to memorize the merchandise, but I know you’re not nice enough to let him. Do you think he just can’t afford any of them? Should we send him away tomorrow?”

“No. He’s going to buy a book.” She was frowning at the shelf full of wind magic texts and supplies. “He’s going to buy one book and a couple of the silk flags. But first he’s going to work up the courage to ask me if we have a novice manual down in the cellar, and I’m going to have to tell him no. Because why would we?”

Moss raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s a strangely specific prediction.”

“Well, I don’t usually have so long to study a customer before I make one, do I?” She unclipped her hair and shook it out, then stretched her arms over her head and stepped over to lock the door.

“Which book is it, then?”

“The first one he picked up.”

“You do realize nobody else watched or cared enough to pay attention to exactly which book he picked up first?”

“New Developments in Swift Wind Magery,” said Lily.

“Oh, Lily, you mean creature. Don’t let him buy that. A mage text? What’s a child his age going to do with it? Use it to prop open doors?”

Lily shrugged. “On top of that, it’s a text full of swiftened spells. I’m sure they all eat through your reserves like a swarm of locusts. But that’s the one. And I’m here to sell books.”

#

Kalen stalked back toward the inn fretting and steaming. I should be practicing new spells by now. There’s magic all around me. I have nothing but time. The only thing between me and learning a real wind spell that isn’t some mixed-up cantrip is…me.

He was a magician. It was supposed to be a simple choice for him to buy the magician books. The store had several options, and though they were obviously intended for practitioners more advanced than him, they held many useful basic spells. But the patterns were all so hard! It was going to take Kalen weeks to master one of them. He might as well be back on Hemarland, practicing while he waited between auroras.

And if he was going to be stuck plucking at his pathways for days before he could even cast, then he should make absolutely sure he was getting the most out of it, shouldn’t he? For some reason, the mage book patterns were only a little more difficult than the advanced magician ones. Something about how they were modified for faster casting?

Ha! More like painstakingly slow casting.

But if it was going to be that way no matter what…wasn’t a mage spell better? Did it even matter?

Maybe I’m just not used to having choices, he thought. If any one of the books had shown up on his shelf at home, he would have loved them to death and been ecstatic. He was only having such a hard time now because he was disappointed in himself and intimidated by the fact that he could only have one book now.

That was what he’d decided. Since his funds were more dear than he’d thought, he would buy one. He would learn every single spell in it. And only then would he allow himself to have another.

He entered the inn and spotted Yarda at a table waiting for dinner. She was happy about the trip to see the healer in a couple of days. They were going to take a carriage overnight together and arrive at the Enclave before sunrise.

Kalen walked over and plopped into the chair across from her. He let his arms sprawl across the table and rested his chin on the wood.

“No books again?” Yarda asked, looking at him curiously over her mug.

“No,” Kalen said. “I can’t pick between a bunch of magician books I should be able to use but can’t. And a mage book I shouldn’t be able to use and…also can’t.”

“Pick the harder one,” said Yarda, as though the solution were perfectly obvious.

Kalen blinked in surprise. “Why?”

She smiled broadly. “You’ve come all the way across the ocean to be a practitioner, haven’t you? And done…” She leaned forward and whispered, “And done the thing we don’t talk about which is why even your own mother thought it might be best if you finally had yourself a proper education.”

“Yes,” said Kalen. “I did do that thing.”

She slammed the mug on the table, slopping out some of the cider, and laughed. “Then pick the harder one! If you fail at that, you can always step back. But you shouldn’t assume you’re going to fail at all!”

Kalen sat up a little straighter. “You’re right.”

“Of course I am!”

#

The next morning, Kalen showed up at Barley and Daughters just after dawn. Hidden away in his pockets, purse, and shoes—so robbers might not find every coin—was exactly the right amount of money for his purchase.

The door swung open with the familiar clinking bell sound, and Lily smiled at him.

“Nerth! Back again, I see.”

“I’m here to buy my first book,” he said. “I want New Developments in Swift Wind Magery.”

“Ah…don’t you want to ask if we have a novice manual in the cellar?”

Kalen tipped his head. “No? Do you, though?”

“Of course not! Why would we?” She bustled over to the shelf to grab the book for him. “Silk flags?”

“Two of them.”

“Ha!” she snapped her fingers and opened the glass cabinet where the squares of silk were stored.

Kalen was already shedding coins from all over his person. He bent to pick up one that had rolled away and added it to the pile he was making on top of the table.

“You know, you’re the youngest person I ever sold a text this advanced to,” Lily said conversationally, counting each coin and transferring them to her smock pockets. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Learn everything in it,” said Kalen firmly. “By midwinter’s day. And then come back for another one.”

“Madness,” said Lily. “But good luck to you.”

She wrapped the book and the flags in so much brown paper that Kalen was already anticipating the number of pages he’d get out of it when he chopped it up and used it for note taking, then she waved him out the door.

All the way back to the inn he felt like he was holding something amazing in his arms. He’d already flipped through the pages enough times to know the names of the spells he was most interested in. He recited them to himself as he walked.

Ears of the East. Casting Pearls. Gale Bottle. Startled Bird. Magnify Breath.

Now all he had to do was decide which one he wanted to start with first.