2. Chapter 2 The Errand #2
I looked at Nott. "Is that a good price? This is the first time I've been portal scroll shopping."
"Yes, market rate, maybe a bit less."
I turned back to Mildred. "That settles it. We'll take all of them. I'd rather have too many than not enough."
"Okay, smart move." Mildred set the six scrolls on the counter in a neat row.
She handled them with the precision of someone who'd been selling adventuring goods for decades, each movement exact and unhurried.
She wrote the sale into a small leather-bound ledger, the same one I'd seen last time, and tore a receipt from a pad of rough paper.
"The scroll binds on first use," she said, tapping the gold wax seal of one of the scrolls. "The user has to be the one who sets it. I'd recommend your tank or your mage. Someone who'll be at the deepest point with certainty."
"Bjorna," Nott said.
Mildred turned to her. That flat measuring quality came back, the same one she'd given me the first time Liv brought me through the door. Then something shifted.
"You're an Elementalist."
"I am."
"What discipline?"
"Multi-branch. Fire primary, lightning secondary, earth tertiary."
Mildred set her pliers down. She came around the end of the counter to the side where Nott was standing, her head tilted at the angle she used when she was sizing something up.
"Three branches at your level. That's unusual. Most mages I see don't branch until they've got twenty levels in their primary."
"I studied at the southern academies before I took combat work," Nott said. "The theoretical framework for branching doesn't require high-level investment. It requires understanding of the ambient interactions between disciplines."
"The interaction coefficients," Mildred said.
Nott's eyebrows lifted. The same tiny shift I'd seen in Cold Hollow when I'd told her my Status still read X. She'd run into something she didn't expect.
"You studied them."
"I enchant them." Mildred walked to her workbench, the one behind the main counter where she did her actual work.
She picked up the brass fitting she'd been holding when we arrived and turned it in the light.
"Every enchantment I put on leather or metal has to account for how the object's material interacts with the mana structure of the enchantment.
Fire enchantments on iron, for example, create a different resonance than fire enchantments on brass. The coefficients are the same math."
"I've never met an enchanter who worked with the coefficients directly," Nott said. She was standing differently now. She'd come forward half a step, and her hands were at her sides instead of folded into her sleeves. Her dark eyes were bright. "Most work from pattern books. Templates."
"Most do." Mildred set the fitting down. "I learned from my husband. He calculated from raw coefficients because the templates available years ago were unreliable. By the time the reliable ones came out, I'd already learned the hard way."
Nott asked a question about resonance dampening in mixed-material enchantments.
Mildred answered. Nott asked a follow-up about how the dampening interacted with sustained-use enchantments like Rings of Holding.
Mildred answered that one too, then asked Nott something about her earth discipline that I didn't fully track.
I stood by the display window and let them talk.
Nott was animated. She talked with her hands, shaping the air into diagrams I couldn't follow.
She asked questions without pausing for permission, the academic precision still there but the reserve gone.
Her voice was different. Not louder, not faster.
Alive in a register she didn't use at the apartment.
She was talking about something she loved, and Mildred could talk back at her level, and that had loosened something in Nott that I'd never seen loose before.
Mildred treated her as a colleague. She didn't simplify, didn't explain basics, didn't slow down.
She disagreed with Nott on a point about mana decay rates and held her ground when Nott pushed back, and the two of them went back and forth on it for a full minute before arriving at something they both could accept.
I leaned against the window frame. Nott's face had changed.
The severity was still there, the cheekbones and the sharp jaw.
But she was lit up in a way I hadn't seen before, and the woman standing at Mildred's workbench wasn't the same person who'd closed her book and stood up from the bench an hour ago.
Mildred caught my eye looking at Nott while they discussed matters that were above my pay grade.
Nott was still talking, but she'd moved past coefficients.
She was telling me about the academies, about a professor who'd taught her the theoretical framework for multi-branch casting and how the man had been brilliant but terrible at explaining his own work.
Her voice had a rhythm to it, easy and flowing, and she used her hands less than she had at the shop but more than she ever used them at the apartment.
"I spent three years on the fire discipline before I touched lightning," she said. "The professor said I was ready after two. I told him two years wasn't enough to understand the interaction space for a single discipline, let alone two."
"And he agreed?"
"He said I was right, then added the third year to my study plan. He was insufferable about being corrected, but he always corrected himself when the correction was valid."
"I like him already. People don't admit they're wrong enough."
She glanced at me. "You would have liked him. He talked as much as you do."
I laughed. It came out easy and natural, and Nott didn't look away from me when I did. Her dark eyes stayed on mine for a moment longer than I was used to from her.