Page 2 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

The World Spell didn’t make them forget, precisely, but it helped them… not notice or not retain anything magical. It was so complex and so vast that Max couldn’t really conceive of what the Spell must have looked like when the Spellsmiths created it.

Spells were sketched with a witch’s finger—only one for simple spells, two or three as they got more complex. They started small, maybe the size of a teacup saucer. He’d seen spells that were the size of a dinner plate, and the occasional very ambitious tire-sized, but that was the extent of it. Trying to envision a spell like the World Spell actually being drawn by someone… Would it be the size of a football field? How could anyone sketch that?

No one had ever figured it out. The Spell had been in place for centuries—no one knew exactly how long—and remained a mystery.

Thankfully, Max wasn’t looking for anything nearly so esoteric today. He scanned through his collection and tugged down a couple of likely options. (Two were ornate, leather-bound tomes, and one looked like it was an exercise book from an elementary school twenty years ago. There was no saying where witches would choose to preserve their spells.) He flipped through them, scanning the drawings. The witch didn’t want indiscriminate growing. She wanted a restoration, if that could be managed. She’d said the accident had just occurred, so it was likely the plants would remember how they’d been such a short time ago, and that meant—

Ah, yes, here it was. Minor restoration of plant life to their optimal form within twenty-four hours. As long as they’d been healthy when the accident occurred, this should work just fine.

He took a photo of the spell because technology had made things a lot easier in some ways, although they all still practiced drawing spells constantly. They had to replicate them in order to actually cast them, after all. But this way, no customer could accuse Max of not faithfully reproducing the spell if it didn’t work the way they wanted. (Because of course those people blamed Max rather than admitting they might have made an error or not asked for the right thing. Customers were the worst.)

The door chimed just as Max emerged from the back room—which always looked dim and showed an innocuous view of vague shelves of totally ordinary books through the beads—and he spent the next twenty minutes guiding the enthusiastic young girl with her witch parent around the store, trying to find the perfect birthday present for a child he’d never met.

It was difficult to be very helpful, but he had to give the child points for wanting to give a book and wanting to pay for it with her very own money.

They wound up with a book on spelunking, a YA novel, and a cozy mystery. Max still had no idea what the birthday child actually liked to read, but maybe their tastes were broad.

“Thank you, Mr. Max!” the girl chirped happily as she skipped out of the shop.

Max inclined his head. At least he’d seen one customer with manners today.

There were some witches and shifters who frequented his shop in person, like this enthusiastic young reader’s parent, recognizable by the “buzz” of magic that he sensed from them. Usually, a stronger sensation of magic meant someone was a witch, while a weaker one meant they were a shifter. Children never felt magical until they either developed magic, usually late in puberty, or it eventually became evident that they were a normal person.

Since many normal people frequented the shop along with the smaller percentage of witches and shifters, they didn’t usually give Max more than a nod of understanding, but that was enough. (He didn’t want to have conversations with anyone, after all, but he did want witches and shifters to know that they were in a safe space.)

Once the shop was empty, Max called the witch back and went through the arduous process of explaining why she had to pay him before he would send the photo of the spell.

“Don’t you understand this is urgent?” the witch demanded, her voice getting rather shrill.

“Don’t you understand that you could already have the spell by now if you’d stop arguing and simply pay me?” Max countered.

The witch sucked in a breath. “Why, I never!”

Max was not in the mood. “Would you like the spell or not?”

“This is not acceptable behavior!”

“I assure you that it’s quite standard to want payment before delivering goods,” Max said with forced patience. “It’s how commerce has functioned for centuries.”

Because everyone knew it was harder to get payment from someone once they’d already consumed your service and didn’t need you anymore.

“I will not be using you again!” the witch huffed.

“That’s your choice,” Max said, because they both knew that if she desperately needed a spell again, there was every chance she’d call back.

The thing about witches was that they remained old-fashioned in some key ways. Spells most often got passed down through families. There were some specialist schools for classes of spells like healing. There was some sharing amongst friends and colleagues, especially amongst the younger generation. But there wasn’t a public institution where you could find the spells you wanted. That left people relying on witches like Max for a paid service. As a Spellreader, he could guarantee a spell did what it was labeled to do. Other witches could only rely on labels, and through accident or design, that could go awry.

The annoyed witch finally gave up and did what they’d both known she was going to do this entire time: she paid him, so he could send her the spell she wanted so badly.

Max hung up the phone with another eye roll.

“She could have been out there fixing all the destroyed plants ten minutes ago if she’d just stopped complaining,” Max told Nōwē.

Nōwē was supremely uninterested in the witch’s issues, which was fair. The woman was very uninteresting, and Max intended to cast her from his mind and never think about her again.

Mondays were one of his quietest days. He made a few more normal person sales and was able to spend a couple hours—in intervals—in the back room, continuing to catalogue spells.

Witches could be very secretive. It was a sensible way of life to ensure that normal people didn’t find out about them, panic, and try to kill them, experiment upon them, or subjugate them. It was how they survived. But then there were the unhelpful forms of secrecy, like not labeling their spells, or labeling them in code, or shifting the spell labels over by one (or seven).