She reached for her blotters. “This is a shop for broken things,” she began.
“Clocks, and locks, and household trinkets,” he finished, “I know the line. Well, this is a household trinket, and I think it might be faulty, so maybe you could do whatever it is you do—” He made a little flourish. “—and check?”
Tes shook her head, even as she tugged the blotters on. The rest of the room disappeared, and Nero with it, the chaos of strings smoothed to a flat and empty black. She looked down at the necklace on its cloth, now the only magic in her vision. It was easy, then, to see the problem. She didn’t need to touch it, but she did, made a show of lifting the necklace, and turning it over.
“It’s not cursed,” she said, “but it is tethered.” Somewhere to her left, Nero groaned. “No wonder they let you win it,” she went on. “Knowing they can hunt you down and take it back.”
He slumped forward, into her line of sight. With the blotters on, all she could see was his face, too close, and the ominous purple of his magic as it twisted through the air around his green-gold eyes. Which were wide, and pleading.
“Unless you untether it.”
Tes sighed. “Unless I untether it,” she said. “Which I’m only going to do so the owner—”
“—previous owner—”
“—doesn’t come looking for it in my shop.”
Nero smiled that dazzling smile. “Have I told you you’re the best?”
“Only when I’m doing you favors.”
“I’ll try to say it more often,” he said, disappearing into the darkness beyond her sight.
“I don’t need your flattery,” she said, ignoring the heat that flooded stubbornly into her cheeks. “Now let me work.” Tes took up a tool, pretending to prod at the spellwork written on the metal instead of the threads running through the air above it. Tools wouldn’t work on the magic itself—she’d tried. Only her hands seemed able to catch and hold, to braid and fray, to knot and tear.
As she picked apart the spell, Nero wandered the shop.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said, and she could practically hear his fingers stop halfway to a shelf.
“How long will this take?”
“That depends,” she said, “on how often you distract me.”
She could have worked a lot faster, but it would have been too obvious what she was—and wasn’t—doing. She heard the crackle of waxy paper as Nero stole another dumpling, and swore, picking at the threads.
Each time she pulled one free of the spell, and set it aside, the light instantly began to fade. Without being bound to something, the magic slipped away, diffused back into the world. In moments, the thread itself was gone. She worked, minutes sliding by, until the necklace sat on the counter, as lightless as the square of cloth beneath it. Nothing but a gaudy bauble. She was still staring at it, resting her eyes in the dark, when something large and metal crashed to the floor behind her.
Tes tore off the blotters and the world rushed in, too messy, too bright.
Nero was behind the counter, one hand still resting on her personal workshelf—her stash, he called it—the wall lined with baskets of half-fixed trinkets and half-formed spells. Things she toyed with between jobs. He knelt to fetch the fallen object.
“Don’t touch that!” she shouted, and he proceeded to drop it again. Tes cringed as it struck the floor, hollow metal ringing as it bounced.
“Is it dangerous?” he asked as it rolled away.
“What do you think?”
“I think it looks like a kettle.”
“It is a kettle,” she said, rubbing her tired eyes. “You put the water in cold and it comes out hot. Or it will, when I fix it.”
“Could you make it come out wine?”
She started to say no, then hesitated. That would be a much more complicated bit of spellwork, since one was simply heating water and the other involved a transmutation, the twisting of earth and mineral into—no; she stopped herself before her mind could race ahead, get lost in the potential.
“Here,” she said, holding out the necklace. “No more tether. Just bad taste and a quick sale.”
Nero took the jewelry, and turned it over in his hands.
“How does she do it?” he asked, directing the question to the owl instead of her.
The truth was, Tes didn’t know. At least, not how to put it into words, ones that would make sense to anyone but her. Most people experienced magic one of two ways: as a raw element, or a constructed spell. Spells were designed to bind the elements into shape, they were instructions for those elements, but few elemental magicians handled spells, and few spellcrafters handled raw elements. One was yarn, and the other a tapestry, which meant that both were made of thread. People assumed that when Tes worked on an object, she read the spellwork, but honestly the marks meant nothing to her. She read the pattern itself, a language no one else could see or speak. One that existed between her, and the magic.
She wondered, sometimes, if there were others who could see the world the way she did, who could reach out and change it. If there were, she’d never heard of them. Which meant, if they did exist, they were smart enough to keep the talent to themselves.
So when Nero asked, as he always did, Tes simply said, “Magic,” and left it at that.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked, pocketing the necklace.
Tes snatched up the bag of dumplings from the counter’s edge. It felt suspiciously light. “Five lin.”
Nero winced at the cost, and she felt herself relenting. It hadn’t been that much work. “How about the three—” She checked the bag. “Four dumplings you ate.”
He brightened. “I’ll bring six.”
“So you can eat half?” she countered.
He winked, and ambled backward, lazily unspooling himself toward the door.
“I want the good ones,” she added, “from the shop on Hera Vas.”
“Only the best,” he said, tugging up the collar on his coat, which looked even rattier than hers.
“Use the money you’re not paying me to get a better coat.”
“Can’t,” he said. “This one’s lucky.”
“It’s full of holes.”
“And yet, nothing falls out, only in.” Nero turned away. “Tell Master Haskin I said hello!” he called back, reaching for the door just as it swung open, and a young man stumbled in.
Nero could have jumped out of the man’s path, but he didn’t, and the two collided in a way that made Tes suspect something had just fallen out of the stranger’s pocket, and into Nero’s.
“Sorry,” said Nero, slowing long enough to steady the new customer, and then he was gone, and the man was barreling toward her, something bundled against his chest.
“Haskin—” he started.
“—isn’t here,” she said. “But I can help you.” Tes was about to go into her speech, about the clocks and locks and household trinkets, but the words died on her lips when she saw the threads in the air around the man.
They were … decaying.
The man couldn’t be much older than Nero, but he looked awful. At first she thought he must be sick, but she’d seen sick people before, the light in their threads dimming with their health. This was different. Like poison spreading through roots. Or a curse.
She recoiled as he dumped the bundle onto the counter between them.
“Need you—to fix.” He stumbled over the words, his hands shaking as he unwrapped the parcel on the counter, revealing splintered wood and warped metal, not so much an object as a collection of parts. Whatever it was—or had been once—it was very broken.
Tes hesitated. She didn’t want to touch it, in case it was the source of the man’s sickness. She had seen cursed objects before, threads dripping with the oily sheen of tainted magic, the air around them bruised, the strings crumbling with rot. But the threads above the broken thing were splintered, not rotten.
Unlike the customer, who seemed to be getting worse by the moment. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose, and there were bruised hollows beneath his eyes.
“What is it?” she asked, but he wouldn’t say, only muttered the words on her shop door.
“Once broken, soon repaired.”