Rhenawedd Lyssene
The Silver Spoon
Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor, Temeria
1253
I had refused to go to the smithy
The reason being that I had spent the better part of three weeks sleeping on the ground in a mountain pass and I felt I was entitled to a morning in a proper bed without anyone requiring anything of me. Matthias had Piotr for company and did not need me trailing along to watch him discuss metalwork with some smith.
That had seemed entirely reasonable at approximately half past seven. By nine it had become somewhat less convincing. It was now ten and I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my shift staring at the wall with a vacant expression due to have been still for long enough that my thoughts had started folding back on themselves, eventually I had arrived at the uncomfortable conclusion that boredom was considerably more unpleasant than tiredness and that the bed, which had seemed like an extraordinary luxury last night, had now become something between a comfort and a trap.
The room was pleasant enough. Genuinely comfortable, it reminded me what it felt like to be a person of some standing rather than a girl in borrowed clothes sleeping under canvas. The mattress was stuffed properly, not with straw that worked its way through the ticking and inserted itself into your back at intervals throughout the night, but with something that yielded without collapsing. The sheets smelled of lavender and lilacs. The window looked out onto a narrow courtyard where a cat was sitting on a wall in the sun.
I looked at the cat for a while. The cat did not look back.
The bath had been extraordinary. I had been in it for what the servant girl had later told me was close to two hours, emerging only when the water had gone from hot to warm to something that could charitably be described as ambient, at which point I had wrapped myself in the linen they had provided and sat in front of the fire in the sitting room until I was dry enough to dress.
Matthias had been gone by then, Piotr apparently having appeared at the door at some point while I was still in the bath and departed with him in tow, which suited me well enough.
I was clean. I was fed. I was rested.
I was profoundly.
Comprehensively
Bored.
The problem with having nothing to do was that it left you alone with your thoughts, and my thoughts, given time, had a tendency to go somewhere I would rather they didn't.
Back to Beauclair, mostly. To the silence in the room when the verdict had been read out and my sister had said nothing. To the road to Caed Dhu. To Tomas, whose face I had managed not to think about since I had killed him, his expression in that last moment, the surprise in it, the tears, the way he had kept saying sorry as though the word might change what he was doing.
I stood up.
The room was too quiet and my head was too loud and I had been putting something off for long enough that avoiding it any longer was starting to feel like cowardice rather than practicality.
I went to my bags.
They were tucked beside the wardrobe, travel-worn leather that had seen better decades, salvaged from the knights' supplies in Caed Dhu and carried through everything since. I knelt beside them and dug past the spare clothes, the rolled spare stockings and the small tin of salve Matthias had procured for my feet at the garrison before the pass, until I found what I was looking for at the bottom.
The dress.
Or what remained of it.
It had been fine once. Deep wine red, good fabric, a princess's gown...now the hem was destroyed, the fabric stained in ways that no amount of laundering was going to reverse, one sleeve torn at the shoulder. It was, by any honest assessment, rags.
But I had kept it.
I sat on the floor with it in my lap and turned it over until I found the bodice, the section of structured fabric at the front that was stiffened with a panel of buckram for shape. I worked my thumbnail along the lower edge of that panel, feeling for the seam, the one that did not match the others. Closer stitching. Sloppy.
Done by a different hand than the dressmaker's, mine, in the night before my exile when I had still had my rooms and my things and a needle and thread along the bitter practical clarity and understood that what was coming would strip me of everything.
The seam gave under my nail.
I worked it carefully, the old thread parting stitch by stitch, until the panel opened enough to admit my hand through.
Inside, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth, was the Heart of Toussaint.
I held it up to the window light. The heavy, teardrop-shaped pendant caught the bright light of the chamber, gleaming with a dangerous, ancient beauty. At its center rested a massive, flawlessly polished red gemstone, as deep and amber as a splash of fresh ducal wine. Framing this central stone were two vibrant green crystals, carved into the likeness of delicate leaves that clasped the gemstone in a permanent, golden embrace. The entire piece was bound together by intricate filigree gold, twisted into symmetric patterns that spoke of master craftsmanship or the finest smiths of Beauclair. It was a heavy, opulent token of absolute royalty, designed to rest against the collarbone of a duchess and command the envy of an entire court.
It had belonged to my grandmother. And her mother before her. And further back than that, into the history of Toussaint that predated most of the records, passed down through the women of the family, it was not just jewelry but inheritance, the kind that carried the weight of everything the family had been and was and might still become.
My mother had given it to me in the days of my infancy, before word of how I might be cursed fully settled into her mind.
It was the last piece of what I had of home. The last thing that was genuinely mine, that no court verdict or my sister's silence could take from me, because no one had known it was there.
I turned it in my hands, watching the light move through the stone.
I had no home any longer. I had a vampire going considerably out of his way to protect and train me out of what appeared to be genuine if baffling goodwill, and I had the clothes on my back and approximately nothing else. What I did not have was the kind of money that made the next stage of this journey possible. Proper funds. The kind that bought passage and equipment and options, the kind that meant Matthias did not have to exhaust his own purse keeping us both alive and mobile.
He had not asked me to contribute. He would not ask. That was, I had come to understand, simply how he was.
Which meant I had to decide.
I looked at the Heart of Toussaint for a long moment, the light moving through the green stone, the vine motif catching the morning sun from the window.
Then I wrapped it back in the oilcloth, tucked it into the inner pocket of my cloak where I could feel it against my ribs, and stood up.
Staying in this room was clearly not an option.
I dressed quickly due in part to having had spent three weeks putting clothes on in a tent in the dark, which was considerably faster than the process had once taken me, and assessed the result in the small copper mirror above the washbasin. The clothes Matthias had arranged to be cleaned in the last inn before the city were plain but well made, a good deep dark red that suited me better than the ill fitting sapphire-coloured things I had been wearing since the forest. My hair had benefited enormously from the bath and two hours of careful attention afterward, it looked like hair again rather than something a bird might consider nesting in.
Rhenawedd Lysenne, minor noblewoman, ward of Ser Matthias Harlow, currently in Maribor for....
Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I patted the pendant in my cloak, my dagger in its hidden sheath at my waist, and went downstairs.
The Silver Spoon's common room was busy, filled with a midmorning energy of an inn that served both residents and the general public, the breakfast rush having given way to the slower commerce of people stopping in for a drink or a conversation on their way between other places.
The smell of food had shifted from morning to something more ambiguous, woodsmoke and ale alongside the lingering ghost of whatever had been cooked earlier.
The servant gir-Myrrah- I reminded myself-was behind the bar, moving between tasks with a quickness I had noticed in her yesterday, the kind of competence that made itself invisible because it never stopped.
She looked up when I came down the stairs and her expression into a more subserviant one an expression I had seen for mst of my life, though without the side of fear or snideness it was an expression that said 'welcome, how can I help'.
"My lady," she said. "Is there anything you need?"
"Fresh air," I said. "And a guide along with it. I don't know the city."
Something in her expression shifted, the professional lilt giving way to something more genuine. She set down the cloth she had been using on the bar and said, "Where were you thinking of going might I ask?"
"Somewhere to trade something extremely valuable," I said. "And somewhere I'm not likely to get robbed or accosted while trying to do so."
She almost smiled at that. "That is a tough thing to ask a serving girl to know," she said, but then she leaned in almost sneakily. "But luckily for you Maribor is a city of trade, and rumors and I just so happen to know a man well versed in both." She came around the bar, drying her hands on her apron. "The market square is twenty minutes away, it's also worth seeing if you haven't. I'll have Piotr show you the way when he gets back. The cloth merchants are good this time of year, before the winter stock comes in. And there's a bookshop on Tanner's Row if that's of interest, old Benedek has everything, he's been there longer than the street has."
I looked at her for a moment. "Come with me," I said.
She blinked. "My lady?"
"You clearly know the city and I clearly don't, and I'd rather leave now then wait for your brother" I said. "And I am sure you wouldn't mind not working for a bit." I kept my voice even and matter of fact, the tone that tended to work better than asking. "Tell your mother you're showing a guest around. It's good hospitality."
Myrrah looked at me. Then at the bar. Then at the door leading to the back room where I could hear her mother moving around doing something involving pots.
"It would only be for a little while," she said.
"Wonderful," I said, and waited while she went to negotiate with her mother, which took approximately three minutes and involved a conversation made up largely of increasingly desperate pleading.
She returned wearing a simple linen coif that concealed most of her dark hair, the edges tied neatly beneath her chin. It was plain, practical, and slightly too large for her, which only reinforced the impression that it had probably belonged to an older relative at some point. She wore it with the expression of someone who had won a significant political victory.
"Shall we go to the market first, my lady?" she asked. "And see where the day takes us?"
"Rhenawedd," I said.
She hesitated at the door. "My lady?"
"My name," I said, pulling my own cloak around my shoulders. "We are walking around the market together, not conducting a formal reception. Lady Rhenawedd will do if you're too stuck up about it."
She absorbed that with the slight wariness of someone trying to decide whether this was an invitation or a test. "Rhenawedd then," she said, trying the name in the same cautious manner one might sample a Zerrikanian delicacy of uncertain make.
She rolled it around for a moment, considered it, and seemed to find it acceptable. "The market it is." We stepped out into the Craftsmen Quarter and the city opened around us.
The morning had warmed since I had looked out at it from the window, the sun having climbed above the rooflines and begun doing the work that autumn sun always did when it came to casting long shadows. The Quarter smelled of coal smoke, hot metal and the working smell of a street where things were actually made, the forge sweat and sawdust and dressed leather that clung to the air like a permanent perfume.
Hammering rang from three directions simultaneously. A cart piled high with timber creaked past us, the driver nodding at Myrrah in recognition.
She moved through the quarter an ease of someone who had grown obviously up in it, navigating by a map that had nothing to do with streets and everything to do with people. The baker whose bread came out at what hour, the cobbler whose awning leaked when it rained and whose step to avoid, the fastest route to the market square depending on what the cart traffic was doing.
"Myrrah! Tell your father I'll have his order ready by Thursday, the hinges came in yesterday!" A heavyset man in a leather apron leaned out of a doorway as we passed, waving a hand that was holding something I could not identify but that appeared to be dripping.
"I'll tell him, Mr. Edvart!" she called back, without breaking stride.
A woman leaning out of an upper window with a basket of wet laundry paused her work to call down. "Is that young Myrrah? Your mother said had important guests at the inn! Is this her? Very fine, very fine! Welcome to Maribor, my lady!"
I looked up. The woman was already smiling broadly down at me "Thank you," I said, which seemed to delight her.
"Its an honor my lady! Let it not be said we people of the quarter have no respect for the nobility!" she announced to no one in particular, and resumed hanging laundry.
A pair of apprentices from what appeared to be a cooperage flattened themselves against the wall to let us pass on the narrow stretch near the corner, one of them nodding to Myrrah shyly.
"Busy morning Hemel?" She said to him.
"Always Myrrah" he said, to a point approximately six inches above her head.
We turned the corner onto a broader road and the foot traffic thickened. A merchant's cart had stopped to negotiate passage with a dray horse whose driver had apparently decided this was an excellent place to adjust his load, and the resulting blockage had created a small parliament of people expressing opinions about it from the pavement.
An old man sitting on a stool outside a barber's shop tracked our progress A pair of city guards nodded to us as we passed the corner post where they were stationed.
"Do you know everyone?" I asked.
"Everyone on this stretch," she said. "The Quarter mostly. Further toward the market it gets thinner." She sidestepped a child who erupted from a doorway at full speed without looking, caught him by the collar before he ran into the cart that was creaking past, set him upright, and sent him back toward the doorway he had come from with a firm but unhurried motion that suggested this was not the first time something like this happened. "Past the square I mostly just know faces."
The child disappeared back through the doorway without acknowledgment. Myrrah continued walking.
"That's Sem," she said, by way of explanation. "He does that every morning. His mother has given up."
A fishmonger's stall came up on our left, the smell of it arriving considerably before the sight , and the man behind it called out to Myrrah with a cheerful grin.
"Ah! Little Myrrah! Fresh river trout this morning, tell your mother, she said last week she'd take two if I had them!"
"She said she might take two," Myrrah said, without slowing. "She'll send Piotr if she decides."
"Send him before noon or they'll be gone!"
"I'll tell her."
"Before noon!"
"I heard you, Michal!" She said a fond exasperation
I walked beside her and watched and said very little, which was its own kind of useful. There was more information in how a person moved through their own city than in anything they could tell you about it directly. Myrrah moved through this one like she owned a small stake in it, a particular ease of someone who knew that the people around her knew her name and broadly wished her well and would notice if she wasn't there.
I had grown up in a palace and never once had that.
"How long has your family been here?" I asked, after we had cleared the Quarter and the street widened into something more like a proper road.
"My grandfather came from the Pontar delta," she said. "Bought the building when I was three. I don't remember it before the inn." She glanced at me sideways with the same careful assessment her brother did, though considerably more subtle about it. "You and you're knight...you're not from Temeria."
"No," I said.
"Toussaint," she said. "By your accents."
I looked at her. She had a slightly pleased expression at the surprise on my face.
"How did you know?" I asked, genuinely surprised. Most commoners heard the accent and placed it somewhere vaguely south without being more specific than that.
"We house a lot of travellers," she said, with the modest satisfaction of someone explaining a skill they had developed through practice rather than talent. "You learn to place people. Last spring we had a wine merchant all the way from the hills of Beauclair, stayed three weeks while he negotiated a contract with one of the estates outside the city." She glanced at me sideways as we navigated around a group of apprentices carrying planks across the road. "He talked about it constantly. I think he was homesick." A small pause, her eyes going briefly distant the way they did when a person was thinking about something they had only ever seen in their imagination. "Is it as beautiful as they say? Toussaint, I mean. He made it sound almost like a fairytale. Like somewhere that shouldn't exist but does."
There was something in the way she asked it, not the polite conversational enquiry of someone filling silence, but the genuine quiet longing of a girl who had grown up on one street in one city and had spent a significant portion of her life listening to travellers describe places she would probably never see. The merchant's stories had clearly lodged somewhere in her and stayed there.
I considered the question honestly, glad in a small way to finally be at least partially truthful with someone about something.
"Most people would tell you the same," I said. "Because it is true. Toussaint is less like a real region and more like a fairytale illustration brought to life." I said it simply, without performance, the way you stated something you had always known but had stopped seeing because you had grown up inside it. "The hills surrounding it are covered in endless rolling rows of grapevines, sun-drenched even in autumn, the soil so rich you can smell it from the road before you can see it. The estates cut into the hillsides in terraces, terracotta roofs, the air always carrying the smell of sweet grapes and blooming flowers and warm earth all at once, layered together into something that doesn't have a name but that you recognise immediately as belonging to that place and nowhere else."
I paused, letting the memory settle into the right shape before I continued.
"But the capital itself is something else entirely. Beauclair sits against those hills overlooking a lake, Lake Seidhe Llygad, and it was built on ancient elven ruins so the architecture is this impossible combination of human ambition and elven elegance. White stone towers that soar too high to look practical and somehow do it anyway. Carved reliefs everywhere you look, in the walls, the archways, the bridges, things that took someone years to make and that most people walk past every day without seeing. Sweeping archways that frame the sky in a way that makes you feel, even if only for a moment, that the city was built specifically to show it to you." I looked at the Maribor rooftops around us, grey and sensible and built for the purpose of keeping rain out. "And the light there is different from anywhere else. It seems to be golden most of the time, as though the sun favours it specifically."
Myrrah had gone quiet beside me. When I glanced at her she had the expression of someone listening to music, present but somewhere slightly removed from the present, the particular quality of a person whose imagination had taken what they were being given and run ahead with it.
"That sounds," she said finally, quietly, "Like a place really easy to miss."
"Yes," I said. "It is."
She walked in silence for a moment, turning it over. "Do you miss it?" she asked.
I thought about it honestly. About the hills and the light and the smell of the vineyards in late summer. About the white towers of Beauclair catching the morning sun. About all the things I had grown up inside and never truly looked at until they were gone.
"I miss what I thought I had," I said carefully. "But I am trying to come to terms with what it is I have left."
She nodded, slowly, at that, clearly seeing it was a sore topic.
"Were you from the city itself?" she asked instead, keeping her voice light, conversational.
"No," I said. "Mine was a small house. The Barony of Lysenne was more an honourable title than anything substantial, a gift given to my great great grandfather for having saved the Duke's life from a sudden gryphon attack, at the expense of his own horse apparently." I had said this story so many times in the past weeks that it came out with the ease of something that had been worn smooth.
"We lived by the Champs-Désolés, a vineyard east of the Sansretour valley. The most dramatic thing that happened in a given year was the harvest coming in late."
"That sounds lovely," Myrrah said, with a wistfulness I attributed to her only having lived in a city.
"It was," I said.
And I meant it, which surprised me slightly. Not so much the estate, nor the title, or the hollow performance of a family that had tolerated me rather than loved me, but the land itself, the particular green of those hills in the morning, the smell of the vineyard in late summer. Those I had loved without knowing I was loving them.
"The merchant," I said, partly to move the conversation somewhere less exposed. "The one from Beauclair. What was his name?"
She thought about it. "Arnaud something. Arnaud Corentin, I think. He was a boisterous enough fellow, very convinced that no wine produced outside Toussaint was worth drinking." She smiled at a thought. "Father agreed with him, they spent three weeks drinking together and arguing about which which wine went with which dish."
"Last night at dinner," I said, the thought surfacing as she spoke, "the wine they paired with the fish. I thought I recognised it, Beauclair White?"
Myrrah's face lit up with the particular pleasure of someone whose domestic detail has been correctly identified by an unexpected source. "Yes! Father bought several bottles from Arnaud before he left, he was very pleased with himself about it." She navigated us around a slow-moving cart without breaking stride. "He also came away with something else, a gift Arnaud handed to him like it was a bar of gold. Something de-Plessure, or some other, I can never remember the name exactly, it's got a long Toussaintois title that Father mispronounces differently every time he says it."
I stopped walking. "Côte-de-Blessure?" I asked.
She turned to look at me, something in my tone catching her attention. "That sounds right," she said carefully. "Do you know it?"
I looked at her for a moment.
Côte-de-Blessure was not a wine you found easily outside Toussaint, even harder to find it in the possession of someone who was not a noble.
It was not a wine you found easily inside Toussaint either, produced in limited quantities by a single estate in the hills above Beauclair, it was the sort of wine that turned up at private dinners and significant occasions and in the cellars of houses that had been collecting it for generations.
It had been my father's favorite...
The market square opened before us at the end of the road, taking me out of my thoughts.
It was not the largest market I had ever seen. Beauclair's festival markets dwarfed it, spread across three squares with merchant tents that ran for half a mile and attracted traders from as far as Ofir. But those had been occasions, set pieces.
This was simply a city doing what cities did every day without making a spectacle of it.
Stalls ran the length of three sides of the square, the fourth given over to a row of permanent shop fronts. The noise of it was considerable, the overlapping voices of sellers and buyers conducting the same negotiations they had probably conducted yesterday and would conduct tomorrow, the particular music of commerce that sounded like chaos from a distance and revealed its own logic up close.
Cloth merchants. Spice traders. A woman selling dried herbs from baskets arranged by smell rather than name. A man with a cart of second-hand tools arranged by size. Two boys arguing over a wheel of cheese that neither of them appeared to have paid for. A dwarf behind a stall of metalwork who caught me looking and raised his eyebrows in the universal expression of a merchant who has spotted a potential customer.
I had grown up with this. Markets, trade, the movement of goods and coin, the language of negotiation and value and the subtle signals of who had money and who wanted you to think they did.
I had missed it, I realised, without having known I was missing it.
"Where do you want to start?" Myrrah asked.
"Lets meet this fellow you mentioned, the sooner I get that over with, the better."
"Alright, he isn't far." She turned us toward the far end of the square, navigating between a stall selling dried herbs and another doing brisk trade in what appeared to be boots. "He's a bit of a miser, but he's honest enough and he knows his trade better than anyone in the Quarter. Just don't get him started on anything music related." She glanced at me with a bit of warning in her eyes.
"He fancies himself a critic. Sonnets, ballads, instrumental compositions, it doesn't matter. If it has notes or verses he has opinions about it, and he will share every single one of them in exhaustive detail whether you want him to or not. I once made the mistake of mentioning I had heard a ballad the inn, you know the one? By the bard Jaskier? About tossing a coin to witchers? Gods I was there for forty minutes listening to him complaining about it."
"Noted," I said.
With that warning delivered we made our way deeper into the market, past a spice merchant who made a spirited attempt to interest us in something imported and a woman selling what she described as genuine Ofieri silk with an enthusiasm that suggested it was neither genuine nor Ofieri.
The square thinned at its eastern edge, the stalls giving way to permanent buildings, and eventually we arrived at a small two tiered structure that occupied the end of a short lane running off the square's corner.
The sign above the door read The Gilded Magpie, painted in careful gold lettering on a dark green background, a small painted bird perched beside it with something bright in its beak. The ground floor operated as a shop, the upper floor clearly a residence, curtains visible at the window above. The building itself was narrow but well kept, the stonework clean, the window glass intact, which was a small statement of prosperity.
The bell above the door chimed as we entered.
"I'll be with you in a moment!" came an immediate greeting from inside, warm and distracted in equal measure.
The shop was not large but it was dense, it was a space that seems to have been accumulating things for years and had organised them with care rather than simply piling them up. Glass cases along the walls held pottery and small valuables arranged on velvet.
Paintings hung between the cases, landscapes mostly, the odd portrait, a few pieces that looked older than anything else in the room and were probably the reason the cases had locks. Shelves above carried the overflow, carved figurines, old weapons mounted for display, a set of matched candlesticks, a ship in a bottle that caught my eye briefly before the conversation at the counter caught my attention.
The man behind it was perhaps fifty, lanky and sharp featured, with quick assessing eyes that seemed to extend to everything he looked at. His hair was grey at the temples and neatly kept, his coat good quality and well maintained.
He was currently holding a pair of earrings at arm's length between two fingers and looking at the figure across the counter from him with an expression of comprehensive professional skepticism.
The figure across the counter was a halfling, barely reaching the countertop, he was round faced and earnest looking, which was undermined somewhat by the fact that he was clearly lying.
"I am telling you, it is real gold!" the halfling said, with a conviction that suggested this wasn't the first time he said that. "I wouldn't cheat you Aldrin."
"That's what you said last time," the man behind the counter, Aldrin said pleasantly. "With the silver bangles."
"How was I supposed to know—"
"And the painting from the Alderman's collection."
"I was scammed on that as well! But I am sure of this one, I—"
"And now you've brought me Mrs. Duran's earrings." Aldrin set them down on the velvet with the deliberate care of someone making a point. "The woman passed last week, Metilette be good Drum. Have you taken to grave robbing as well as the rest of it?"
"That is an ugly accusation and I resent the remark!" Drum reached for the earrings with the wounded dignity of a man who has been insulted beyond endurance. "I'll take my business elsewhere!"
"Now wait." The man behind the counter put two fingers gently on the halfling's wrist, not stopping him exactly, just pausing the motion. "You hairy bastard, I never said I wouldn't take them. Just have the common sense to smelt them next time, saves us both this conversation." He picked them up again, turning them in the light with a practiced squint. "Best I can do, given that I'll have to handle the smelting myself, is thirty crowns."
"Thirty!" The halfling's outrage was magnificent, genuine and total. "They're worth at least a hundred!"
"They are worth at least a hundred to someone who can sell them openly," Aldrin said, "You are more than welcome to find that someone. I can recommend several jewellers in the Quarter who would be happy to hear your account of how you came by them." He waited. "Now make your mind up quickly, I have honest customers waiting and I'm afraid this conversation has already made a rather poor impression on my behalf."
The halfling looked at the crowns the man had placed on the counter. Then at the earrings, clearly having an internal debate.
"Fine," he said. "Gods damn you, Holt." He snatched the crowns, swept past us toward the door, and delivered his parting wisdom to me and Myrrah in passing. "Watch your purse with that bastard."
"See you next week, Drum!" He called after him cheerfully.
"Piss off!" The bell chimed as the halfling departed.
The man behind the counter straightened, the professional pleasantness returning to his expression like a coat put back on after a moment's undress, and turned his full attention to us.
His eyes moved from Myrrah to me. They lingered on me a fraction longer than was strictly professional, the same inventory that everyone's eyes performed, though in his case I suspected it extended beyond the personal and into the commercial, the quality of my cloak, the particular way I carried myself, the small signals of background that people gave off whether they intended to or not.
"Myrrah!" he said, with genuine warmth. "I see you've brought along a guest." He came around the counter with the smooth unhurried motion of a man accustomed to making people feel expected rather than evaluated. "And quite the beautiful one at that." He inclined his head with a small precise bow, the bow of someone who had learned the gesture and used it deliberately rather than automatically. "Aldrin Holt, at your service, my lady. How can I be of any help to you today?"
"Rhenawedd Lysenne," I said, when he looked at me expectantly. "Of Toussaint, currently traveling." I kept my tone pleasant and my posture the particular kind of relaxed that communicated ease without inviting familiarity. "And yes, to answer the question you're about to ask, I am here on business rather than browsing."
"The best kind of visit," Holt said, returning behind his counter. "And what sort of business, if I might ask?"
"The sort where I have something of value and need to understand what my options are," I said. "I was told you were the person in Maribor to speak to about such things."
He spread his hands in the gesture of a man accepting a compliment he considered accurate. "I do my best to be useful to people in that situation," he said. "The nature of the item?"
"Jewelry," I said. "Toussaintois. Old."
Something shifted in his expression, a professional sharpening of attention. "How old?"
"Several generations at minimum," I said. "Possibly older."
He was quiet for a moment, studying me with the careful assessment of someone deciding whether to take a thing seriously. Then he said, "May I see it?"
I reached into the inner pocket of my cloak, unwrapped the oilcloth with an unhurried care, and set the Heart of Toussaint on the velvet square he had placed on the counter between us.
Myrrah made a small involuntary sound beside me, something between a gasp and an intake of breath. Aldren said nothing. He simply looked at it for a long moment with his hands very still on the counter. Then he said, quietly, "May I?"
"Please," I said.
He picked it up with two fingers, and turned it toward the light from the window. The green stone caught it immediately, that deep interior luminescence that had nothing to do with reflection, the colour living inside the gem rather than on it. The vine motif caught the light along its edges, the individual rubies throwing tiny red refractions across his fingers.
He reached under the counter without looking away from the pendant and produced a small monocle in a brass frame, which he fitted to his eye with the practiced motion of long habit. He brought the pendant close. His lips pressed together slightly.
"White gold setting, not plated, not alloyed below standard. The detail work is..." He trailed off, the monocle doing something at very close range to one of the smaller leaves. "This took someone the better part of a year," he said finally, with the quiet conviction of someone reading something the way a craftsman read it. "Minimum."
He set it down on the velvet and removed the monocle and looked at me with the expression of a man who was about to say something that cost him professionally.
"My lady," he said. "This is extraordinary."
"I know that already," I said.
"And I cannot buy it from you."
Myrrah looked at him. "Aldren—"
"I am not being modest," he said, with the slight irritation of a man who has been misunderstood. "I mean that literally. What this is worth exceeds what I could bring to bear, and what I could bring to bear would insult it." He looked at the pendant again with the expression of a man saying goodbye to something. "If I offered you what I could manage you would be giving it away, and I am not in the habit of fleecing friends of friends."
I looked at him for a moment. "Then what would you suggest?"
He leaned on the counter slightly, and something in his expression shifted, the professional assessment giving way to something that, if I was reading him correctly, had rather less to do with business.
"As it happens," he said, "Maribor has recently acquired a very wealthy patron of the arts. Newly arrived, generously funded, and with the kind of genuine appreciation for beautiful things that tends to translate into what I would describe as enthusiastic acquisition." He paused. "She is also, I should mention, extraordinarily kind-hearted, to children especially. In my experience and entirely objective assessment." The slight elevation of his chin as he said this was a small masterpiece of involuntary self-betrayal.
Myrrah made a sound beside me that she converted into a cough.
"And tonight," he continued, "she is hosting a soiree at her temporary residence. Private affair. Fellow artists, collectors, the occasional musician. The sort of evening where beautiful things change hands between people who understand their value." He looked at me. "If you were serious about finding a buyer, my lady, I cannot think of a better residence to be in."
"Then get me into that room," I said.
He tilted his head slightly. "The difficulty is that it is a private affair, as I said. Invitations are not extended casually, and your nobility, while evident, is not known in Maribor." He considered. "Now, if you had some additional quality to offer, a talent, something that would give me a reason to recommend you as a guest worth having rather than simply a seller looking for a buyer..." He looked at me with the delicate expression of a man floating a suggestion he wasn't entirely sure would land. "Do you sing, by any chance? Or dance? Our hostess has a particular fondness for performed arts."
I thought about it for a moment.
Then I thought about Matthias in the pass, voice carrying off the stone walls, the violin he played in order to help me sleep.
"I cannot," I said. "But I know someone who can."
Holt's expression brightened. "A musician?"
"Among other things," I said.
He looked at me for a moment, before sighing and nodding his head.
"I'll take your word it then my lady, bring them tonight," he said. "I'll have the invitation arranged by this afternoon."
Myrrah had been quiet throughout the latter half of this exchange. I glanced at her and found her looking between me and Holt. "This is going to make Father very happy," she said finally, to no one in particular. "He's been trying to get an invitation to one of her evenings for months."
"He's welcome to come," I said.
"Don't," Holt said immediately, with the flat certainty of a man who had considered and rejected this option. "He'll talk about wine the entire evening and I will never hear the end of it from our hostess."
I picked up the Heart of Toussaint, wrapped it back in the oilcloth, and returned it to my pocket.
"This afternoon then," I said to Holt.
"This afternoon," he confirmed. "And my lady." He looked at me over the counter with the directness of someone making sure they were understood. "Whoever your musician is, make sure they're prepared. Our hostess has excellent taste and a low tolerance for mediocrity."
"They'll be prepared," I said.
I was going to have to tell Matthias about this.
That conversation, I reflected as Myrrah and I made our way back out into the morning, was going to be interesting.
Authors Note: That's it for this chapter. I'm sure those of you familiar with the lore can already tell who the patron is, and what it might mean for the story going forward, please tell me what you think and if you have any questions, your continued support means the world to me, and this is an outlet I am thankful to be getting support for indulging.