POV: Mira
Forty-one gold coins.
Mira counted them twice at the kitchen table in the gray morning light, stacking them into neat piles and then unstacking them and stacking them again like the number might change if she arranged them differently. It did not change. It stayed at forty-one, which included the coin Kael Ashvane had left last night, which she was counting as income and not as a strange unsettling mystery because she did not have time for strange unsettling mysteries right now.
She had a list.
She had been writing it since five in the morning when she woke up on the cot in the back room and stared at the ceiling and started doing math in her head. Flour. Salt. Dried beans. Onions. Potatoes. Cooking oil. Wood for the fire. Two new lamp wicks. A mop, because the one she had found was more of a stick with regrets attached to it. A latch for the back window, which had a broken hinge and kept swinging open in the night and letting in cold air and, she suspected, the rat she had evicted yesterday who seemed to feel strongly that the arrangement was temporary.
She looked at the list. She looked at her forty-one coins. She did the math.
The math was not kind.
She put on her coat and went to the market anyway.
Irongate's supply market in the morning was a completely different animal from Irongate at night. At night the city was loud in a reckless blazing way. In the morning it was loud in a working, purposeful way vendors setting up stalls, delivery carts rumbling over cobblestones, dungeon raiders moving through in groups with the focused quiet of people who had early shift runs scheduled and no patience for anything that slowed them down.
Everything was expensive. Not a little expensive. Aggressively, almost rudely expensive.
Mira walked through the main market rows with her list and her face very neutral and her internal voice getting louder and louder and less polite with every price she checked. Flour was three times what it cost in Errath. Cooking oil was four times. A basic mop a mop, a simple cleaning tool cost more than she had charged for six bowls of stew last night.
She understood, logically, that a dungeon city ran on different economics. The people here earned more than normal people because they risked more than normal people. So everything charged more to match. Supply and demand. She understood it.
She still wanted to argue with someone about it.
She was standing in front of a grain stall doing the math on whether she could make a soup thin enough to stretch one bag across three nights when she looked up and saw, at the very back of the market, a small stall with no flashy sign and no crowd in front of it. Just a wooden counter, a neat arrangement of goods, and an old man sitting on a stool reading a folded piece of paper.
He had one arm. His left sleeve was pinned up at the shoulder, clean and matter-of-fact, like it had been that way long enough to stop being a story. He had the kind of face that had been weathered past expression into something simpler not unfriendly, just settled. Like he had seen enough of the world that very little of it surprised him anymore.
Mira walked over.
He looked up from his paper. He looked at her list, which she was still holding. He held out his remaining hand without being asked, patient as a wall.
She gave him the list.
He read it. He read it again. He looked at her over the top of it with eyes that were doing something she couldn't quite name not pity, not suspicion. Something more careful than either.
"How long have you been open?" he asked.
"One night," Mira said.
"Hmm." He looked at the list a third time. Then he stood up, moved to his shelves, and started pulling things down.
"I haven't asked the price yet," Mira said.
"No," he agreed, and kept pulling things down.
He packed everything on her list. Good quality she could see that even without knowing the brands, the flour was fine-milled and the oil was clear. When he put it all on the counter he named a number that was thirty percent lower than anything she had seen in the main market rows.
Mira stared at him. "Why?"
"Consider it a first customer rate."
"That's not a real thing."
"It is if I say it is. It's my stall."
Mira looked at the supplies. She looked at him. "Why are you being kind to a stranger?"
He paused. He put both hands one hand on the counter and looked at her for a moment. "I'm not being kind to a stranger," he said. "I'm being kind to the name on your deed."
Everything in Mira went still. "What does that mean?"
He studied her face. Something moved in his expression something old and complicated. Then he reached over and pulled the front shutter of the stall half-closed, the way people do when a conversation needs to be smaller than the surrounding noise.
"What do you know about your mother?" he asked.
Mira's throat tightened. "She ran an inn. She cooked. She died four years ago."
"She ran an inn," Eldon Marsh said slowly, like he was deciding how much to say and where to begin and whether this was the right moment. "That's true. She also " He stopped. He shook his head once. "Come back," he said. "When your bar is on its feet and you have an hour to sit still and hear something properly. Come back then."
"Tell me now," Mira said.
He looked at her. "You have forty coins and a first-night run and two days until rent is due," he said. "You don't have room in your head for this right now. Come back when you do." He pushed the supplies toward her. "The discount stands every time. Just bring the empty sacks back."
Mira wanted to push. She wanted to stand there and demand the rest of it right now. But he was right and she hated that he was right. She picked up the supplies.
"I'll come back," she said.
"I know," Eldon said. "You've got her eyes. You'll want the answer eventually. You won't be able to leave it alone."
Mira walked back through the market with her arms full and her head loud with questions she couldn't answer yet.
The second night was bigger than the first.
She didn't know how word had moved so fast but the tables filled early and stayed full and she and her single mop handle ran the whole thing alone and by mid-evening her feet were aching and her voice was slightly hoarse from talking over the noise and she was happier than she had been in longer than she could remember.
He came in at the same time as the night before. Corner table. Same chair. Same stillness.
"Water?" Mira asked, passing his table.
He nodded once.
She brought it. She brought stew without asking, same as before. He said nothing. She went back to work.
At the end of the night, when the last customers shuffled out and Bex no, not yet, there was no Bex yet, there was just Mira when Mira was alone and wiping down the counter, she noticed he was still there. Still in his corner. Not eating, not drinking. Just present, the way a lit fireplace is present, adding something to the quality of the air in the room that she couldn't name.
She didn't ask him to leave. She finished her closing work.
When she finally looked up, the corner table was empty. She hadn't heard him go. She turned to check the back window the one with the broken hinge that had been letting the cold in, the one she hadn't had the right tool to fix yet.
The hinge was new.
Solid, clean, perfectly fitted. Someone had replaced it so neatly that the new metal was the only thing that gave it away.
Mira put her hand on it. Still slightly cool from being worked. Done tonight. Done recently.
She turned and looked at the empty room.
Nobody mentioned it.
Nobody had seen anything.
Mira stood in her quiet bar with her hand on a hinge she hadn't fixed and thought about a man who ordered plain water and left gold coins and repaired broken things without being asked and felt something shift in her chest that she was absolutely not ready to examine yet.