Didn’t notice, not until Vares perked up, beak clicking in alarm.
Tes looked up, her hands still buried in the spell.
With the blotters on, she couldn’t see more than a hand’s width, so it took her a moment to find the customer. He was large, with a hard face, and a nose that had been broken more than once, but her attention went, as it always did, to the magic around him. Or the lack of it. It wasn’t common to see a person without any power, and the utter absence of threads made him a dark spot in the room.
“Looking for Haskin,” he grunted, scanning the shop.
Tes carefully withdrew her fingers, and tugged the goggles off, flicking the burlap back over the sword. “He’s busy,” she said, tipping her head toward the rear of the shop, as if he were back there. “But I can help.”
The man gave her a look that made her hackles rise. She only got two kinds of looks: appraising, and skeptical. Those who saw her as a woman, and those who saw her as a girl. Both looks made her feel like a sack of grain being weighed, but she hated the latter more, that way it was meant to make her feel small. The fact, sometimes, it did.
The man’s hard eyes dropped to the sword, its hilt poking out from beneath the burlap. “You even old enough to handle magic?”
Tes forced herself to smile. With teeth. “Why don’t you show me what you have?”
He grunted, and reached into his coat pocket, withdrawing a leather cuff and setting it on the table. She knew exactly what it was, or rather, what it was meant to be. Would have known, even if she hadn’t glimpsed the black brand circling his left wrist as he set it down. That explained the lack of threads, the darkness in the air around him. He wasn’t magicless by nature—he’d been marked with a limiter, which meant the crown had seen fit to strip him of his power.
Tes took up the cuff, and turned it over in her hands.
Limiters were the highest price a criminal could pay, shy of execution, and many considered it a harsher punishment, to live without access to one’s magic. It was forbidden, of course, to bypass one. To negate the limiter’s spell. But forbidden didn’t mean impossible. Only expensive. The cuff, she guessed, had been sold to him as a negater. She wondered if he knew that he’d been ripped off, that the cuff was faulty, the spellwork unfinished, a clumsy snarl in the air. It was never designed to work.
But it could.
“Well?” he asked, impatient.
She held the cuff between them. “Tell me,” she said, “is this a clock, a lock, or a household trinket?”
The man frowned. “Kers? No, it’s a—”
“This shop,” she explained, “is licensed to repair clocks, locks, and household trinkets.”
He looked pointedly down at the sword sticking out of the burlap. “I was told—”
“It looks like a clock to me,” she cut in.
He stared at her. “But it’s not a clock…？” His voice went up at the end, as if no longer certain. Tes sighed, and gave him a weighted look. It took far too long for him to catch it.
“Oh. Yes.” His eyes flicked down to the leather cuff, and then to the dead owl, which he’d just realized was watching him, before returning to the strange girl across the counter. “Well then, it’s a clock.”
“Excellent,” she said, pulling a box from beneath the counter and dropping the forbidden object inside.
“So he can fix it?”
“Of course,” Tes said with a cheerful grin. “Master Haskin can fix anything.” She tore off a small black ticket with the shop’s sigil and a number printed in gold. “It’ll be ready in a week.”
She watched the man go, muttering about clocks as the door swung shut behind him. She started to wonder what he’d done to earn that limiter, but caught herself. Curiosity was more danger than a curse. She didn’t survive by asking questions.
It was late enough now, the tide of foot traffic beyond the shop retreating as the residents of the shal turned their attention toward darker pursuits. It got a bad reputation, the shal, and sure, it could be a rough place. The taverns catered to those who’d rather not cross paths with the crown, half the coin used in the shops had come from someone else’s pocket, and residents turned their backs at the sound of a cry or a fight instead of running in to stop it. But people relied on Haskin’s shop to fix and fence and not ask questions, and everyone knew that she was his apprentice, so Tes felt safe—as safe as she could ever be.
She put away the unfinished sword, downed the last of her tea, and went about the business of locking up.