10min-stories

Never Let a Fae Buy Your Coffee

She goes to the back of the shop — past the refrigerated case, past the worktable with its burn marks and measuring rings, to the lockbox on the bottom shelf that she keeps under a simple ward of her own making: four knotted cords and a sigil drawn in iron-gall ink on the inside lid. She opens it. Inside are her working notebooks, the ones she actually uses rather than the presentable ones on the shelf near the front window.
She finds the right notebook. Opens it to the page. The formula is there in her handwriting — cramped, annotated, corrected in three colors of ink. Silver-cap mushroom extract, yes, but also weld-root from the banks of the Lenne river, and a particular concentration of distilled dew collected from the leaves of trees that grow at the boundary of places. The boundary ingredient is the key. She’d worked it out over six weeks of failed attempts, and she’d never written it down anywhere else.
She copies it out onto a clean sheet of paper. Slowly, carefully, because the terms said written in her hand and she is not going to rush this and introduce ambiguity. Every measurement. Every timing note. The specific temperature at which the silver-cap extract denatures if you let it go too long. The thing about the dew.
When she comes back into the front of the shop, Sable Venn is standing exactly where she left him, with the particular stillness of something that doesn’t need to fidget.
She holds out the paper.
He takes it. His too-long fingers close around the edge without touching hers — which she suspects is deliberate, because additional contact creates additional terms, and they are both, in this moment, being very precise.
He reads it. His eyes move across the page without the small unconscious movements human eyes make — no backtracking, no pause. He reads it the way a scanner reads a document: complete, immediate.
Then he folds it. Tucks it inside the October coat.
“Debt settled,” he says. “Fully. Cleanly. Without remainder.”
“Debt settled,” she confirms.
The resonance in his voice, when he’d said it, had shifted — a frequency below speech, something she’d felt in her back teeth. The seal closing.
He moves toward the door. Pauses, one hand on the frame, and looks back at her with those amber eyes.
“You’ll find the silver-caps grow along the Calloway Lane wall now,” he says. “East end, where the brickwork is oldest. They’ve been there three seasons. I suspect you’ve been buying them from the Midden when you didn’t need to.”
She stares at him. “You planted them?”
“Consider it interest paid in advance,” he says. “We’re even now, Ananya Desai.”
And then he’s gone. Not dramatically — no flash, no smoke. He simply steps through the door and is no longer there, the way a candle is no longer there after it’s blown out.
The air in the shop slowly loses the smell of copper and crushed petals.
Ananya stands very still for a long moment. Then she picks up her coffee. It’s still warm — she’d set it down only minutes ago, though the encounter had felt much longer.
She drinks it slowly, standing in the middle of her own shop, surrounded by her jars and her notebooks and the small hum of the refrigerated case.
Then she takes her coat from the hook by the door and steps out into Calloway Lane.
The east end of the wall is three minutes’ walk. The brickwork there is the oldest on the street — dark, lichen-covered, bulging slightly where the roots underneath have been working at it for longer than the building records can account for.
She crouches down.
And there they are. A quiet cluster of them, growing from the gap between the wall and the pavement: silver-cap mushrooms, their tops the pale, luminous grey of a winter sky just before the snow. Three seasons’ worth, unhurried, doing exactly what they do. Growing in a place she walks past every day without looking closely enough.
She doesn’t take any yet. She just looks at them for a moment — at the way they catch the thin afternoon light and hold it, softly, like something that knows it has time.