As I had suspected, the sigh that followed was a long one — the particular sigh of a man who feels personally burdened by the collective failings of the world around him.
"Not the brightest one, are you?" he said, the discreet, silent corrections of before now replaced with something considerably more direct.
I stepped aside as he approached, letting him reach his precious jewellery.
"I'll explain this once," he said, "so listen carefully." Another sigh, this one drawn out enough that his mouth stayed slightly open at the end of it.
"Silver goes on the right-hand shelves. Gold on the left. Anything set with gemstones goes in the centre, directly beneath the chandelier — the light catches the stones properly there. Pieces are organised by size, by weight, and by price. This is the first room, so only the lower price range is displayed here. Mid-range pieces go in the second room. The third room holds the most valuable items, alongside the client lounge, so they can be examined comfortably." He delivered this not just to me but to the whole crew, clearly and without raising his voice, the way someone speaks when they expect to be heard correctly the first time and have no patience for repeating themselves.
*He really is a merchant,* I thought, somewhat involuntarily. *He has all of this mapped out completely.*
It puts something to rest, in a way. Whatever else he was — sorcerer, alias-user, employer of beings who were decidedly not entirely human — the merchant identity wasn't a fabrication layered over something else. He cared about this. The precision, the organisation, the visible frustration when something was out of place — none of that was performance. And the pieces themselves were genuinely extraordinary, each one distinct, crafted with a level of skill that bordered on the impossible.
He was also, I was rapidly discovering, an irritating perfectionist.
"You'll be late," Benedict said, cutting cleanly through the lecture mid-flow.
Reichert paused.
"Quarter of an hour to ten," Benedict continued, with the easy authority of a man who has talked his employer out of things before. "Don't worry about any of this — if something's still wrong when you get back, we'll fix it then. Go now, or you'll be the one keeping the emperor waiting." He let that land for a moment. "We've got the rest of the day. Out you go."
He gave Reichert a light shove toward the entrance, and there was nothing in the logic of it to argue with.
Reichert exhaled — tired, resigned — and ran a hand back through his hair, pushing the silver strands into place. They moved smoothly under his fingers, catching the light, immaculately kept.
*I bet they smell good too.*
I caught the thought a half-second after it had already formed, and stood there in mild horror at my own brain.
*That was a strange thing to think.*
The reaction was immediate and entirely unwelcome — even in this magically conjured male form, I felt my cheeks warm slightly.
*Is he really that appealing?*
I crouched down beside the next crate, opening it with more focus than the task strictly required, and watched him cross toward the entrance out of the corner of my eye. The morning sun caught him fully as he stepped through — broad shoulders, easy posture, the kind of figure that looked good in motion without trying to.
*Fine. A little. Like a single mustard seed's worth.*
I turned my attention firmly back to the crate.
*Arvid is a hundred times more appealing. Because he's my mate.*
My hands stopped on the lid of the crate.
*Wait.*
*Is that the order of it, though? Am I drawn to Arvid because he's my mate — or am I drawn to him, and he happens to be my mate? Those aren't the same thing. If it's the second, that's straightforward. But if it's the first—*
"Chop chop, lad! No time for daydreaming!"
Benedict's voice cut through my spiral with the efficiency of a bucket of cold water.
"Boss being gone doesn't mean you slack off! If you lot want lunch any time soon, we finish these boxes first — now move!" He directed this at the whole group, earning a couple of low groans from the others.
I set the thought aside — gratefully, if I was honest — and let my body take over from my mind for a while.
---
Working under Benedict, it turned out, was considerably more comfortable than working under Reichert's exacting attention. He was strict in his own way — he had standards, and he enforced them — but there was no weight to his gaze, no sense that every action was being silently measured against some impossible internal standard. If something was wrong, he told you why, told you how to fix it, and moved on. No sighing. No silent relocations of misplaced items.
By the time the sun had climbed well into the sky, we had worked through half the crates.
"Break time," Benedict announced finally, mopping at his face with the back of his arm. He was sweating considerably, as were the other two workers — and this was inside the shaded tent. I found myself with some retroactive sympathy for the four crew members who'd gone down with heat sickness. If this was the experience under cover, building the tent itself, under direct sun, must have been brutal. The southern sun did not appear to negotiate.
"I'll fetch water," one of the workers said, and slipped out through the entrance.
He was slight, almost delicate in build — the kind of frame that looked like it shouldn't be capable of lifting the crates he'd been lifting all morning with the same apparent ease as Benedict. Black eyes, red hair, and something about the set of his features that put me in mind of a fox before I could articulate why. The impression sharpened when a faint scent reached me as he passed — subtle, easily missed by an ordinary nose, but mine was not ordinary. Fox. Unmistakably.
The other worker — a young woman, barely past adolescence by the look of her — sat down heavily on a crate and let out a long breath. Brown hair, eyes the colour of amber that occasionally, in certain angles of light, narrowed into vertical slits. Pale skin with a faint iridescent quality beneath the surface, like something seen through still water. She wore thick glasses with heavy black frames — whether to obscure the eyes or simply because she needed them, I couldn't tell. And she smelled, distinctly, of a snake.
*This is genuinely strange,* I thought, not for the first time today. *What kind of ordinary merchant ends up surrounded by an entire collection of — whatever these people are.*
The girl looked up, and her eyes met mine.
She blinked, several times in quick succession, and went a deep, immediate red.
*Shy, then.*
"Hello," I said, offering what I hoped was a reasonably charming smile. "Henry Delgon. Nice to meet you."
She opened her mouth — clearly attempting some version of a greeting — met my eyes again, went somehow even redder, and abandoned the effort entirely, looking back down at her hands.
"Don't expect much out of her for a while," Benedict said, settling onto a crate of his own and loosening the collar of his tunic. "It takes about three months before she'll string you a full sentence. That's Sheriya. The one who went for water is Phoenix." He fanned himself with a piece of cloth. "By the night goddess, it's hot."
He glanced at me, and his expression shifted into something between curiosity and suspicion.
"And that's the other odd thing, lad — how are you not sweating at all? At this rate you should be the one handling the pieces directly. The rest of us are dripping all over everything, but you're dry as a bone."
"Happy to help with that," I said, and was saved from inventing further explanation by Phoenix's return, a large jug of water in hand, which immediately redirected everyone's attention.
They drank like people who hadn't seen water in days — fast, unhurried about manners, clearly more interested in relief than presentation. I took my turn after them, mostly for the sake of appearances, and we got back to work.
---
By the time the last crate was emptied, the afternoon had slid well into evening, and there was still no sign of Reichert.
Lunch — or what passed for it at this hour — arrived in the form of a large basket of sandwiches, thick with some kind of seasoned meat. I had been wary at first; eating food of unknown provenance while wearing a conjured face felt like an unnecessary complication. But the smell defeated my reservations almost immediately.
The other three abandoned any pretense of manners entirely. By the time I had finished half of my first sandwich — which was, admittedly, extraordinary — the others were already well into their second. I looked at the basket, which had seemed enormous when it arrived, and reconsidered whether it would actually be enough.
My second sandwich sat, untouched, on my lap.
I became aware of a particular quality of attention directed at it.
Phoenix's eyes had found my untouched sandwich with the focused interest of a man who has finished his own considerably faster than he'd intended.
"Do you want it?" I offered, holding it out. "I don't think I can manage a second."
He didn't hesitate for even a moment.
"Thanks, brother," he said, already splitting it neatly in half and passing one portion to Sheriya, who accepted it without a word, her ears still faintly pink.
"You absolute glutton — that's someone else's food!" Benedict scolded him, with the long-suffering tone of someone who has had this exact conversation many times before.
Phoenix gave no indication of having heard him at all, continuing to eat with complete contentment.
Benedict sighed, and let it go.