Matthias Harlow
The Silver Spoon, Craftsmen's Quarter, Maribor City, Maribor, Temeria
1253
I had been to cities before.
Not this kind, granted. The cities of my world were a different order of magnitude entirely, glass and steel and artificial light, the kind of density that made Maribor look like a large village by comparison. But I had walked through crowds, navigated unfamiliar streets, managed the particular sensory overload of too many people in too small a space.
I had not managed it as a vampire.
The first evening had been instructive in the most uncomfortable sense of the word. We had arrived at the Silver Spoon as the light was failing, been shown to our suite by a boy named Piotr Kaska, twelve years old and constitutionally incapable of silence, who had informed us in the space of the trip here that his father owned the inn, his mother ran the kitchen, his older sister did the accounts and helped with the tables, and that he himself intended to take over when his father retired.
A classic Maribor success story, as it turned out. The Kaskas had arrived in the city three generations back as dyers from somewhere in the Pontar delta, accumulated enough coin to buy a building in the Craftsmen's Quarter when the previous owner's debts caught up with him, and had been expanding incrementally ever since. The city was full of stories like it. Maribor had been a trade hub long enough that the instinct for commerce had worked its way into the architecture, the whole place arranged around the movement of goods and coin with the organic efficiency of something that had evolved rather than been planned.
It was, by any measure, an impressive city.
It was also, by any measure, an extremely dense one.
Late that first evening, after Syanna had retired and the inn had quieted to its nighttime register, I had attempted to take the ring off.
I had made it approximately halfway out the door, venom filling my mouth before I had caught myself, it had been an immediate reaction, not a gradual build, or the slow creeping hunger I had learned to manage on the road with open fields and animal blood and room to breathe.
It was an immediate, comprehensive response to the information my senses were suddenly processing without the ring's suppression. Because in a city like this, tightly packed, its buildings leaning toward each other across narrow streets, its population pressed together, there was always someone bleeding. Always. A kitchen accident, a child's scraped knee, a shaving cut, a woman's monthly, the accumulated small injuries of several thousand people going about their daily lives in a space the size of a few city blocks.
All of it arrived at once.
I had stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame and my jaw clenched, venom filling my mouth before I had even realized what I was trying to do, someway, somehow, perhaps thanks to the lingering effects of the Place of Power, I managed to put the ring back on and went to sit by the window instead.
So...the ring stayed on in the city. I would take it off only when I went out to hunt in the fields beyond the walls...or if I found a suitable human target, which was a thought I was choosing not to examine too closely at present.
I turned that compromise over in my mind as I looked out at the Craftsmen's Quarter in the early morning, the street below already busy, Maribor did not do slow mornings. The Quarter especially, with its smithies and tanneries and textile workshops, all of which apparently operated on the principle that the working day should begin as early as possible and end as late as the light allowed, though according to Piotr the city wasn't always this busy, everyone was preparing for their birthday celebrations of the children of the Duke, he in fact thought that was the reason we came to Maribor, and complimented us on coming two weeks earlier, or we would have been hard pressed to find accommodation anywhere decent.
We had paid 245 Orens upfront for the week. Twenty-five a night for the suite, which Syanna had insisted on without apparent concern for the expense, on the grounds that maintaining the appearance of minor nobility required minor nobility's standards of accommodation. She was not wrong.
Arriving at a mid-range inn in the Craftsmen's Quarter on two good horses, dressed as we were, and then requesting the cheapest available room would have raised exactly the kind of questions we could not afford, but still some part of me thinks that was just an excuse she used to avoid sleeping in a seedy place.
The suite was comfortable. Two rooms, a shared sitting area, a hearth that actually drew properly, and a window overlooking the street that let in enough morning light to be pleasant without being inconvenient. The stabling for the horses added to the weekly total but was non-negotiable, Épine had earned decent accommodation several times over.
Which left us somewhere in the region of 1,700 Orens, looted from dead knights and earned in Dregsdon, which sounded like a reasonable sum until you started doing the math on how long it needed to last.
Like I said, Maribor was bustling, especially now, but like all cities it had it's fair share of rumors. The city itself was operating under a particular kind of political tension that you felt before you understood it, the way you felt a change in weather before the clouds arrived. King Foltest was distracted, that much was common knowledge even among the merchants and craftsmen who had no direct interest in court politics. His daughter, the one who had been cursed and had recently been cured, had left him distracted in a way that his advisors were apparently finding difficult to manage.
A king who was not governing was a vacuum, and vacuums in politics filled themselves. The vacuum in Temeria had a name. Duke Jurkast, Foltest's cousin, governed the city and the surrounding region with what the people considered a fair and hust demeanor. I had heard him described three times in our first day in the city, by three different people, in terms that all amounted to the same thing: a steady hand, a clear head, looks so much like the king you'd do a double-take in the street. His son was mentioned alongside him with the particular pointed emphasis of people who were thinking about succession without quite saying the word.
Foltest had no male heir, and the child he did have was a resurrected hellbeast born of incest, the whole city knew it. The whole city was, with varying degrees of subtlety, doing the math.
A knock at the sitting room door, brought me out of my thoughts. "Come in," I said, without turning from the window.
The door opened gently, and a voice greeted me, just as softly. "Good morning, Sir." A voice that was not the energetic boys I was expecting, greeted it me, it was older, a woman's, I turned my head to face her.
She was perhaps twenty, with her brother's dark hair and considerably more of her mother's considered expression, the kind that naturally came to a person if they worked a hospitality job long enough. She was tall, willowy and capable looking, if she wore glasses I'd have expected to find her in a library.
Her brown hair fell to her shoulders in curly waves. Her face was open and pleasant, with a quality of warmth that sat in the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Her hands, where they some folded linen, were capable and work roughened. She was...I guess comely would be the proper word for it, less due to just her features and more due to how she put herself together.
She was also, very carefully, not looking directly at me.
Her eyes had done the same thing everyone's eyes did when they first encountered my face properly, the brief arrested quality of someone whose visual processing had flagged something unexpected, followed by the deliberate redirection of a gaze that people employed when they did not want to be caught staring. Except that she kept redirecting it back, small involuntary returns that she was clearly aware of and equally clearly could not entirely prevent. It was something I knew I would never get used to.
The staring.
I had not been unattractive before the transformation. That much I could say with reasonable honesty and without vanity. I had been a reasonably put together man in my mid twenties, the kind of face that was pleasant enough to look at without being remarkable, the kind that got a reasonable return rate on a night out without inspiring anyone to compose poetry about it afterward.
I had never walked into a room and had it go quiet. I had never had a conversation derailed by the person I was talking to simply losing track of what they were saying.
That was over.
The transformation, as best I had been able to work out from the limited recollection available to me on the subject, did not simply preserve what was there. It amplified it. Took the raw material of a person's appearance and refined it, removing the irregularities and inconsistencies that accumulated in a human face over decades of living, the asymmetries, the small imperfections, the signs of weather and sleep deprivation and bad diet and the general wear of existing in a body that was never quite optimised.
What remained was a kind of distillation, the face you might have had if every variable had gone in your favour from birth, pressed through whatever crystalline process had rebuilt every other part of you and polished accordingly.
The worse the raw material going in, the less dramatic the result. The better the raw material, the more unsettling the outcome.
I had been solidly above average going in. What came out the other side was not average, it was the fundamentally optimal version of the face I had been born with, which was a description that sounded clinical until you were on the receiving end of the staring.
It meant that people like this young woman, a composed and professionally capable person who had almost certainly encountered every variety of travelling merchant, soldier, and minor noble that passed through a busy Temerian trading city, was standing in my door frame visibly gobsmacked.
Half the time I genuinely could not tell whether people were staring because of what I was or simply because of how I looked. The red eyes helped disambiguate in some cases. In others it made it worse. I had decided, somewhere around the third week of this existence, that the most practical response was to simply become very good at pretending not to notice.
"Excuse the intrusion Sir, my name is Myrrah, Myrrah Kaska," she said eventually , setting the linen down on the side table with slightly more attention than the task required. "It-it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ser."
"Ahh, so you're the older sister," I said, turning from the window properly. "We didn't have the opportunity to meet yesterday." I inclined my head slightly. "Sir Matthias Harlow, though I'd prefer if you spoke comfortably with me."
That appeared to catch her slightly off guard, the formal address being the easier register to hide behind. She recovered quickly, the hospitality training asserting itself, but something in her posture had loosened a fraction.
"Ser Matthias then," she said, trying it out with the careful neutrality of someone who was not yet sure what the correct tone for that was. Her eyes made another small involuntary trip to my face before she redirected them to the linen she was straightening, which did not need straightening.
A minute passed in which she found several additional things to do with the linen that it did not require. "Is the linen all you needed from us?" I asked.
"Excus-oh!" She straightened, the professional composure snapping back into place. A faint colour had risen in her cheeks that she was clearly hoping the morning light was insufficient to reveal. "Yes, I apologise. I was sent up to let you know that breakfast will be ready shortly and will be brought up to the suite. Pork belly, eggs, fresh bread, soft cheese, and whatever fruit came in from the market this morning, we had apples and dried plums yesterday so likely the same."
She smoothed her apron with both hands, the gesture she appeared to use when reorienting herself. "As per your...wards request last evening, a bath has also been drawn and is ready for her whenever she wishes, the water's kept heated through the morning so there's no rush." She tucked the ledger back under her arm with a businesslike finality. "And when you're ready to see the armorer, Piotr will take you. He knows a smith on Coppergate Lane personally, been running errands there for years. Best metalwork in the Craftsmen's Quarter."
"Your help is a appreciated, and tell Piotr to come up in about an hour."
She nodded, crisp and efficient, and moved toward the door with the air of someone completing a task that had taken longer than it strictly should have. At the threshold she paused, which I was beginning to suspect was habitual rather than deliberate.
"Will there be anything else, Sir?" she asked.
"Not at the moment," I said. "Thank you, Myrrah."
The name landed with a small, involuntary effect she did not quite manage to suppress before she turned and pulled the door closed behind her. A few seconds of corridor silence.
Then, predictably, Piotr's voice from somewhere below.
"Well, I told you didn't I?"
"Go and get the breakfast," his sister said.
"That's not—"
"Piotr." Footsteps retreating. Then, after a moment, returning.
"You like him," he said, in a tone of voice that I could practically hear the smug grin from, and I wondered if it would go unanswered.
The sound of a something being thrown and a yelp was my answer. I stood from where I sat and went to wake Rhenawedd up.
Tholin Cran
The Anvil & Oren, Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor City, Maribor, Temeria
*Clang* *Clank Clang*.
Aye, there it was. Sweet as a Mahakaman war drum.
The hammer rang through the cool Maribor morning while the human smiths farther down Coppergate glowered from their smoky little sheds. Let 'em glower. Miserable shavepates couldn't keep a rhythm if ye nailed it to their boots and paid a man t' count time beside 'em.
They looked at my forge and saw a dwarf barely eighty winters old, fresh from Mahakam, setting up shop in a human city like he had stones bigger than his beard.
And they were right.
Back home the elders wanted me hauling coal and bowing to clan seniors for the next hundred years afore they'd let me near proper steel. "Patience builds mastery", they'd say, hands folded across their enormous beards like they were delivering holy scripture from the bloody Ancestors themselves.
Patience, my arse.
Patience was just another word fer old bastards sitting atop piles of Orens making sure no young blood climbed high enough t' shake them loose. The elders had mastery alright. Mastery and a deathgrip on every decent contract in Mahakam and a vested interest in making damn sure that situation never changed.
Me? I'd rather take my chances in a city that didn't care where I was from so long as the work was good and the price was fair.
Maribor was where the coin flowed. Merchants. Knights. Tourneys. Noble vanity dressed up in enough polished steel t' sink a river barge. Human fools loved nothing more than stomping about in armour worth three years of a commoner's wages, staring at their reflection in it and telling themselves they'd earned it.
And every one of them needed a smith.
The breastplate under my hammer glowed orange-white as I lifted it with the tongs, squinting through the sparks. Decent ore on the face of it. Foothill stuff, the kind that came down from the Amells in steady supply and kept half the smiths in the Craftsmen's Quarter in business. But human smelters had handled it first, curse rot their lungs and their shortcuts along with them.
Could smell the sulphur still in it.
Cheap bastards had saved coin on charcoal and left the iron brittle as stale rye bread. Lazy human forgework always told on itself once ye started working it proper. Metal speaks if ye know how t' listen, and this piece was telling me in no uncertain terms what it thought of its previous handlers. Ungrateful smelters who'd rather deliver fast than deliver right, because fast meant payment now and right meant waiting, and waiting meant trusting that the smith who'd commissioned the work would still be alive t' collect it.
A lesser smith would've beaten it flat, greased it shiny, and robbed the customer blind.
Not me.
I folded the plate over itself again, hammer crashing down in the steady rhythm that had been in my blood since I was old enough t' stand at an anvil without a stool, beating the slag and weakness from its guts with the particular satisfaction of someone correcting someone else's mistake at someone else's expense. The elders always said I lacked patience. Funny thing was, there was no patience like a dwarf working toward riches. I could do this all day and feel nothing but the good productive ache of a craftsman earning his keep.
When Captain Veron strutted through Maribor wearing this breastplate, every officer in the garrison would ask who forged it.
And he'd tell them.
Tholin Cran. Anvil and Oren. Craftsmen Quarter, third forge on the left coming off the main road, ye'll hear it before ye see it.
They'd remember the name.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Veron was getting soft round the middle, mind ye. One of those men who'd fought half a skirmish ten years ago and had been drinking t' its memory ever since, the kind whose campaign stories grew longer with each retelling and shorter in actual military content. Wanted armour that made him look lean, fierce, kingly. Told me he wanted t' cut an impressive figure for the tourney.
I told him I'd make him look like Henselt himself.
I also widened the flanks by two inches without telling him, because humans were delicate creatures who had the structural integrity of particularly ambitious pastry. One hard sneeze and their ribs folded like cheap tin. If the fool caught a spear in armour too tight for breathing, it'd tarnish my reputation something awful, and I had not hauled myself eight hundred miles from Mahakam t' have my craftsmanship associated with preventable deaths.
Can't have dead clients interfering with future profits. Bad fer the brand.
Outside, the city was already stirring with more than its usual morning energy. Through the open shutters came the sound of wagons and hawkers and the particular rhythmic banging of carpenters doing something ambitious t' the main avenue, which when I'd looked out at first light had turned out t' be the raising of banners along the lampposts. Tournament banners. Weeks early, which told ye something about how seriously Maribor took these things.
Word around the Quarter was that King Foltest himself might come down from Vizima t' watch armoured idiots knock one another off horses for the entertainment of the aristocracy. Good. Kings meant courtiers. Courtiers meant the particular species of competitive vanity that resulted in men spending money they didn't strictly have on armour they didn't strictly need in order t' look better than the man standing beside them at a formal occasion.
Knights meant contracts. Contracts meant Orens. Orens meant Tholin Cran sitting on a considerably larger pile of them by this time next year.
I shoved the plate back into the forge and hauled the bellows. Fire roared upward, flooding the workshop in white-orange light that threw my shadow long and dramatic across the back wall. A beautiful sound. A beautiful smell, once ye got past the sulphur, which I had, years ago.
Gods, I was exactly where I was meant t' be. And by the Ancestors I'd own half this street before winter.
Then came the sound of boots on cobbles outside. Quick ones. Light ones.
Here comes trouble.
"Mister Tholin! Mister Tholin! Got something you'll want to see, I've been walking so fast my legs have gone funny, Father said..."
I grunted without looking up from the bellows. "Busy, lad. Unless ye've brought gold or ale, piss off fer an hour."
"But you said you wanted to armor a proper knight!"
"I say lots of things," I said, squinting into the forge. "Most of them are after whiskey and therefore non-binding."
"But this one's..."
"Boy."
"He's got a sword with runes on it..."
I paused.
"...and his armour's been busted by something enormous and he's staying at ours and Father thought of ye straightaway and his ward is a noblewoman and..."
I looked up.
Piotr Kaska stood in the doorway wearing that expression he always wore right before making himself comprehensively insufferable, the bright-eyed forward-leaning look of a boy who had decided he was delivering important news and intended t' deliver every syllable of it regardless of what anyone else was doing. The lad talked like a Nilfgaardian siege engine rolling downhill. Once he started, there was no stopping him.
"...and she's very pretty and very grand and he's very tall and his eyes are..."
Behind the boy stood a man. Tall. Pale.
Not the sickly pale of fever or the grey pale of a man who hadn't slept in three days. I suppose it had a natural pallor to it. The kind that had something t' do with constitution or heritage.
Dark doublet, well cut but travel-worn, the kind of garment that had started its life as something finer and had been asked t' work for a living since. Boots with genuine road on them. A sword at his hip he was definitely familiar with, not a peacock knight who wore steel as a fashion choice and kept it polished for the same reason.
I set the tongs down slow so as t'not seem rude. Then I looked at his eyes. Red.
They were not drunk red, not the bloodshot scarlet of a man who'd been crying or hadn't slept in a week. Not even the pale pink that sometimes came with certain rare conditions of the blood. Proper red, a deep, steady, arterial red, the kind that prickled the beard at the back of your neck if ye let it.
Half-elf maybe, He's got the looks for it.
Didn't matter a great deal t' me so long as his coin spent the same as anyone else's, and his presence here on the eve of the biggest festival in recent memory suggested that coin was there t' spend.
Behind him, visible through the open workshop door, stood a silver mare of a quality that had no business being in the Craftsmen's Quarter except as evidence that someone was doing well enough t' have one, and on its flank next t' a tarp I assumed held said armour in question based off the noise they'd made when they approached, was an honest t' Gods monster's head.
Interesting. Very interesting.
I set the tongs aside slow and deliberate, the way ye set something aside when ye've already decided what came next and you're just completing the motion.
"Boy," I said, without taking my eyes off the stranger. "Go fetch the whiskey from the back shelf."
Piotr perked up with the instant alertness of a child who has been given a task and intends t' discharge it at maximum speed.
"The good bottle," I added. "The one with the blue seal. I'll not shame me ancestors by offering a guest something fit fer Oxenfurt students t' drink on a dare."
The boy's face fell as he understood this was a dismissal dressed as an errand, but he went, because he was a sensible enough lad underneath the enthusiasm and he could read a room when the alternative was being told twice.
His footsteps retreated toward the back of the workshop.
I wiped the soot from my hands onto my apron, a gesture that was more ritual than practical given how thoroughly the soot had established itself over the years, and stepped out from behind the anvil.
"Tholin Cran," I said, stopping a comfortable working distance from the man and looking up at him with the straightforward assessment of someone who dealt in material properties fer a living and had simply extended the habit t' people. "If ye came looking fer a smith, ye've already made the smartest decision ye'll make all week."
"Sir Matthias Harlow" he replied in a Toussaintois accent. I let my eyes drop once, deliberate-like, t' the etched sword on his hip. Then back up.
"It is an honour, ser, and if that's what I think it is on your hip," I said, nodding toward the sword, "then I've got questions. But those can wait." I gestured toward the horse. "First let's see what I can help ye with."
The man inclined his head, the kind of small courteous gesture that came naturally to folk raised around manners and expensive tableware, and said, "I recently had an unpleasant encounter with a forktail."
He nodded toward the horse, toward the bundled shape lashed to the saddlebag that I had been pointedly not staring at since he walked in. I looked at it proper now. The canvas had shifted enough in transit t' show the edge of something scaled and roughly the size of a large bull's head, which meant the rest of it was considerably larger than that.
"As you can see, it did not survive the encounter," he said. "Unfortunately my armour did not survive it either." A brief pause. "Fortunately it was not properly fitted to me in the first place, it belonged to a former acquaintance of mine. My original armour, along with much of what I owned, is..." He seemed to consider how t' finish that sentence and decided against finishing it. "That isn't important right now. What is important is that I need you to repair it and resize it to fit me."
I looked at him. Then at the forktail head on his horse.
"Aye," I said. "Let's have a look then."
He led me t' the horse and began unloading the armor pieces with an ease that belied how strong he was. Pauldrons, couters, vambraces, greaves, the breastplate last. No chainmail with them, just the plates, which at his quiet question I directed toward the wide table at the back of the workshop where I did my assessment work.
He set the armor down and I unwrapped it.
Right.
Toussaintois plate, no question. Ye could tell by the weight distribution before ye even looked at the construction, the way the pieces sat relative t' each other, the geometry of the protection it was designed t' offer. Someone had spent real money on this at some point, the kind of money that bought ye a commission from a smith with a name rather than a smoky shed and a prayer t' the gods. The gilding was largely gone now, worn away by road and weather and what had clearly been significant violence, but the underlying metalwork still showed beneath it. Quality steel. Properly tempered. Shaped by someone who understood the middle ground between armor that looked impressive and armor that actually worked.
The pauldrons were scratched and dented but structurally sound. The couters showed wear consistent with hard use. The vambraces and gauntlets had taken a few glancing impacts but nothing that couldn't be worked out. The greaves were the best of the lot, barely touched.
Then there was the breastplate.
The left side was wrong in a way that took me a moment t' properly process. The nature of the damage didn't fit any weapon I could immediately name. Deep gouges running upward toward the armpit, and that was bad enough, but the gouges weren't the part that had my professional attention fully arrested.
The metal had been ripped as though it were made of tin.
How in the black depths of Mahakam is this man standing in my workshop?
I turned the breastplate over in my hands, running my thumb along the deformation, checking the integrity of the metal around the damage, looking for the secondary fractures that usually radiated outward from this sort of abuse.
They were there. Hairline, mostly, but present.
"So," he asked me as I set the armour down. "Can you fix it?"
"Fix it?" I straightened up and looked at him. "The smiths of Mount Carbon themselves couldn't fix this, and I mean that literally, not a figure of speech." I gestured at the damage. "By the Ancestors, did ye just stand still and let it wail on ye?"
"They move faster than their size would suggest," he said.
"They move faster than..." I stopped. Looked at him and then at the breastplate. "Aye. Apparently." I stroked my beard in thought.
"So you're saying there's nothing to be done?" he asked me.
"I didn't say that." I held up a hand before he could look too encouraged. "The pauldrons, couters, vambraces and greaves are well enough. Dented, scratched, need resizing t' fit ye proper, but the metal's sound. Those I can work with." I looked back at the breastplate. "As fer the breastplate itself, if ye don't want t' wait a month or two fer me t' forge ye a new one from scratch, I suppose I could scavenge what's left of the good metal and put together a demi-plackart. Cover the heart at least, give ye something across the front."
"That sounds reasonable," he said.
"It's not reasonable," I said flatly. "It's a compromise born of necessity and I want that stated plain. A demi-plackart over chainmail is not going t' stop anything serious from gutting ye if something gets through. Ye'd be giving up a significant amount of lower abdomen protection."
"Let me worry about that," he said in a tone I couldn't quite place.
"Fine," I said, because it was his guts at risk and not mine. "Then here's what we're looking at."
I pulled out the ledger I kept for estimates, mostly fer the benefit of customers who liked seeing numbers written down as though mathematics somehow made pain easier t' swallow, and began tallying. Materials fer the resize and repair on the workable pieces. New leather fer the strapping throughout, because the existing straps were beyond salvage. Metalwork fer the demi-plackart, including whatever I could recover from the ruined breastplate. Extra hours fer a rush job, because he clearly needed this done quickly and quickly always cost more. That's just economics.
"Rush work like this, including leatherwork and material costs and resizing on all four working pieces and the plackart construction." I looked up. "Let's call it two thousand two hundred orens."
He winced.
Not dramatically. Just a small tightening round the eyes that lasted maybe half a heartbeat before his expression flattened again. But I saw it, and the excitement that had been building since I'd first clocked the Greater Dazhbog rune on his sword began quietly leaking out of me like ale from a cracked keg.
Ah. There it is.
He couldn't afford it. Or at least couldn't afford it comfortably. I waited.
"Is there anything to be done about the price?" he asked. "What if I included the forktail trophy?"
I looked at him. Then at the horse outside where the forktail head still hung lashed t' the saddle like some grisly hunting prize.
"Do I look like an alchemist t' ye? A witcher? What in the name of the Ancestors would I do with a forktail head? I don't know a single armour diagram that calls fer forktail skull as a crafting material." I paused, thinking it through. "Though the hide's a different matter. Good monster leather's worth something. Miserable stuff t' work with but durable once ye break it proper, and the novelty alone would sell t' the right buyer."
I did the sums in my head.
"Throw it in and I'll shave three hundred off."
"That's still more than I currently have available," he said. "My circumstances don't presently afford me the luxury of being careless with expenses. There has to be something else."
I looked at him. He looked at me.
The silence stretched, and my irritation with it.
"Join the bloody tourney if ye're so broke! Gods below, that's what I get fer listening t' that braindead..." I stopped.
Wait.
The tourney. Foltest potential attendance. Knights. Officers. Courtiers. Every puffed-up noble bastard in Temeria trying t' outshine the man beside him.
And standing in my workshop, carrying a sword with a Greater Dazhbog rune and hauling around the severed head of a forktail like it was venison from a hunt, was a man who had survived something that could tear plate armour apart with its bare claws.
"...Actually, aye." I pointed at him. "That's exactly it. Join the tourney in the armour I forge fer ye. Make it past the qualifiers, get yerself seen, strut around a bit, and I'll only charge ye fer materials. Six hundred orens total."
One eyebrow rose slightly. "That's a significant reduction."
"Six hundred orens is still six hundred orens," I said, "and I want something in return worth more than the rest of it." I gestured between him and the armour and the forge and the street outside where my competitors were probably still sulking in their smoke-choked little workshops. "A knight wearing my work and performing well in a tourney with the king potentially watching is worth far more t' me than the difference between six hundred and two thousand two hundred. Every commission I get afterward because some noble prick in the stands asks who forged that armour is pure profit."
I folded my arms.
"Ye get decent armour at a price ye can actually manage. I get the finest advertisement in Maribor this season. Everyone walks away happy."
I watched him consider it.
"And if I don't make it past the qualifiers?" he asked.
"Then ye pay me the full amount," I said. "So I'd suggest ye make it past the qualifiers."
--------
Authors Note: That's it for the first chapter of Crooked Crowns! Hope you enjoyed it.
As the title probably gives away, this volume is going to dive much deeper into the political side of the Witcher world. Court intrigue, rivalries, regional tensions, noble ambition, trade, reputation, and all the messy human complications that exist alongside the monsters. Matt's stepping into a world where a sharp tongue can be just as dangerous as a sharp sword, and where power rarely belongs to the strongest man in the room.
I also really wanted this chapter to ground the setting a bit more through people like Tholin. One thing I've always loved about the Witcher setting is how alive the world feels outside the main plot. Smiths, merchants, soldiers, innkeepers, nobles, criminals, everyone's trying to survive, profit, climb higher, or simply keep their head attached to their shoulders.
And of course, the tournament arc is officially underway, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll stick around for what comes next.