Small-Town Crafter 6: Everyday Enchantments (Small Town Crafter) by Tom Watts

Small-Town Crafter 6: Everyday Enchantments (Small Town Crafter) by Tom Watts

Author:Tom Watts [Watts, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 12

My progress in the basement felt slower than a snail crawling over treacle, but it wasn’t all bad. This had still been a high level enchantment. Detecting and identifying it gave me a decent experience boost, and I wasn’t going to argue with that.

After locking up the basement and saying bye to Aut and her apprentice, I left the school and took a shortcut along Maple Street and into the town center. There, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my store on Coiner’s Way. I had a stack of orders the size of James Trafford’s’ tavern bill to complete over the next few days, and I wanted to uphold Cooper and Cooper – Artificers of Renown’s reputation for punctuality. Or at least, I wanted to earn us a reputation for that.

So, among other things, I spent a few hours artificing a bird box for Alister Tillwright. A very particular bird box that would hopefully solve a very particular problem.

Alister, his brother Jonathan, and his sisters Jane and Samantha ran a farm just outside of town. They’d inherited it as a rundown mess, but they were tilling it into something special, acre by acre. Samantha Tillwright, the eldest sister, was studying part time at Hattersdale College, where she’d earned three of the five skill trees she needed to become a veterinarian. The other three siblings toiled on their late father’s farm all day long. Alister and Jonathan were fully-classed farmers now, their experience soaking into them like the sweat on their shirts. They even had long stalks of hay that they chewed on while they spoke to you, which was the farming equivalent of the artificer’s pencil-behind-the-ear pose. Jane, the youngest of the family, was almost a full farmer, too, with just the animal husbandry skill tree to earn.

Alister was wearing faded denim trousers that were more muddy brown than denim blue. His shirt, once bought from an expensive tailor shop in Weller’s Hope where he used to work at a bank, looked like it’d been trampled on by a horse. He’d trailed muck in with him, too, which meant I’d have to mop the floors before I left later on. Thankfully, I had a cleaning solution that Janey had given me the alchemy formula for. One squirt of that stuff would clean my floorboards so deeply they’d look like new.

“How goes it?” said Alister, using his new accent that was slowly becoming part-Sunhampton, part-Weller’s Hope. It was an affectation, but he meant well. One thing Sunhamptoners respected in any new arrival was an honest attempt to fit in. All you had to do was complain about the weather twice a day and buy the occasional round of drinks in the tavern, and folks around here would treat you like their best friend.

“Hey, Alister. Let me just grab my notepad…” I said, shifting a stack of papers to one side, “…okay. What can I do for you?”

He leaned on the counter, grass stalk jutting from his lips like a pipe.



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