Chapter 58: First Town

Kael put the jar away and sat with his back against the headboard and looked at the dark ceiling.

Fourteen silver and six copper after the inn rooms. Eleven silver and six copper after the healer.

‘Need work,’ he thought. ‘Not urgently. Soon.’

He picked up the notebook from the floor beside the bed.

The common area was empty at this hour. The innkeeper hadn’t come down yet. The fire from last night had burned to embers that still threw enough warmth to sit near. He pulled a chair close and opened the notebook to a clean page and held the pen over it without writing anything.

“You are awake early,” Seradhiel said.

“Arm,” he said.

“Encouraging,” Kael said. Then, after a moment, “Funny how you still have a nose from inside a ring.”

“I have been sealed,” she said, “not dismantled. My senses function through the channel whether you find that amusing or not.”

“I find it useful,” he said. “The amusing part is a bonus.”

A pause.

“Go write something,” she said. “Before I change my mind about helping you.”

“What should I write,” he asked.

“Something true,” she said. “That is the only rule the notebook has ever had.”

He thought for a moment.

Then he wrote: She said something true last night that she immediately tried to frame as an observation about someone else. I didn’t push. Some things land better when they’re allowed to land at their own pace.

He looked at what he’d written.

“What did you write,” Seradhiel said.

“Something true,” he said.

She didn’t push either.

Mira came down at seventh bell.

She looked like she’d slept and not like the sleep had helped. The particular quality of someone whose body had gotten the hours and whose mind had done something else entirely with them. She sat across from Kael at the common area table and ate the bread and soft cheese the innkeeper had set out with the focused attention of someone who had decided that eating properly was a task to be completed rather than an experience to be had.

She finished the bread.

Looked at the second piece.

Ate that too.

Small things.

“There’s a town two hours north,” she said. “Proper market. Guild outpost.” She looked at his arm. “Proper healer if you need one.”

“The crossroads healer was fine,” he said.

“The crossroads healer was adequate,” Mira said. “There’s a difference.”

He almost smiled. “How do you know every healer between Valdris and the southern territories.”

“Escort jobs,” she said. “You learn where the good ones are when you’re the one getting patched up.” She picked up her spear from beside the chair. “Shall we.”

They left the inn at seventh bell and twenty minutes. Nine silver and six copper coins remaining after breakfast. The innkeeper had charged two copper each for the morning meal which Kael considered reasonable and noted without complaint.

The town was everything the crossroads settlement wasn’t.

Wide main road. Market stalls on both sides running the full length of it, vendors calling across the noise of morning commerce, the smell of food and livestock and fresh cut wood mixing in the way that only happened in places that had been doing this long enough to have a smell that was specifically theirs.

A guild outpost on the north end. Three stories, red banner above the door, a notice board outside it covered in papers three layers deep.

Kael went to the notice board.

Mira went somewhere else.

He didn’t track where. She was Bronze Realm in a town that knew what Bronze Realm looked like and she had a spear and her own money for the first time in three weeks. She was fine. The performing fine and the actual fine had been getting closer together since breakfast and he chose to trust the trajectory.

He read the notice board.

Standard postings. Escort jobs, Gate monitoring, investigation requests, a bounty on something that had been taking livestock from a farm two hours east that the description suggested was a Class F Gate beast operating solo. Below the standard postings the usual collection of lower tier work errands, deliveries, the kind of thing that paid four copper and required no rank minimum.

And a Class E Gate monitoring assignment. Two hours east. Different direction from the livestock problem. Eight copper per check-in, renewable daily, currently unclaimed.

He pulled it and went inside.

The outpost clerk was more efficient than the Crestfall one and less efficient than the Valdris one, which put him somewhere in the middle of Kael’s experience with outpost clerks generally. He processed the visiting registration without much comment. Iron listed in the system from the Valdris registration, Bronze Realm actual output visible to anyone with sufficient Essence sensitivity, the gap between them something the clerk noticed and filed without asking about.

Kael took the monitoring assignment and went east.

The Gate was exactly Class E.

Small, stable, nothing emerging, the kind that opened and sat and slowly degraded over a week or two without producing anything dangerous if left alone. He logged the check-in, noted the stability readings in the monitoring ledger, and was back in town before noon.

Eight copper richer.

Nine silver and fourteen copper total.

He found Mira at a food stall near the center of the market. She was holding something small wrapped in paper. The kind of wrapper that meant something sweet, a pastry or a confection, the sort of thing that cost two or three copper and had no practical value whatsoever.

She was eating it with the careful attention of someone relearning what it felt like to buy something because they wanted it rather than because they needed it.

She saw him coming and didn’t put it away or explain it. Just kept eating.

Kael stopped beside her and looked at the market.

“Good?…” he said.

She looked at the remaining half of whatever it was.

“Yes,” she said. Like the word surprised her slightly.

He looked at the stall. Bought one himself. Two copper.He had just Nine silver and twelve copper coins remaining.

It was a honey pastry. Warm. The kind of thing that tasted better than it had any right to for two copper.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!