Calmere had walls.
Not high walls, not the fortified kind that meant a city that had defended itself against armies, but solid stone walls the height of two men, with a gate that stood open during market season and guards who looked at the incoming wagon with the bored professional assessment of people who had been watching harvest wagons come in for a month and expected to watch them for another.
Arthur looked at it from the wagon seat as they passed through the gate and thought: so this is a town.
Thornwick had a market square, a mill, a smithy, and three streets. Calmere had a market square, a mill, a smithy, six streets, two inns, a guild hall, a proper apothecary, a cloth merchant, two taverns, and what appeared to be a small mages' circle indicated by the specific copper sign above a doorway that his reading had told him to look for. The streets had cobblestones rather than packed earth. The smell was the smell of a lot of people living close together, which was not unpleasant exactly but was very different from home.
His mother was already making mental notes. He could see it in the way her eyes were moving.
His father drove them to the inn — the larger of the two, the White Grain, which had a stable yard big enough for the wagon and a board outside that listed room rates in clear numbers. He negotiated the week's lodging with the innkeeper while Arthur and his mother and the girls brought in the bags. The room was two adjoining ones with a connecting door, clean and warm from the inn's hearth system, with windows that looked over the stable yard.
Edric stood in the middle of the larger room and looked at all of them.
'I'll be at the market from second bell,' he said. 'That's the work. Your mother has her list.' He looked at the children. 'Clara.'
Clara straightened slightly.
'You're in charge of the young ones while we're occupied. Keep them together. Don't go past the market square without telling us where.'
Clara's expression was the expression of someone who had been given official authority and was being mature about it and was also very pleased.
'Of course,' she said.
Edric nodded. Then, with the quality he had of adding the thing that mattered most last: 'You did well today on the road. All of you.'
He said it to the room and then he was looking at his bag and the moment was done, which was how Edric Voss gave compliments — precisely and then over, no invitation to make more of it than it was.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then Clara said, 'I know,' and nobody could argue with that.
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Clara led them through the market square in the morning, which was the right move — the square was the center of everything and once you had it mapped the rest of Calmere organized itself around it. The smell of roasting something was coming from the eastern side. A cloth merchant had bolts of winter fabric stacked in bright colors outside the door. A bookseller had a cart of secondhand volumes that Lyra spotted from fifty feet away and began moving toward with purpose.
Arthur had a different destination.
The guild hall was on the north side of the square, identifiable by the standard — the crossed tools and compass that meant adventurers' guild rather than the merchants' guild two doors down. He had read about guilds extensively. He had never been in one.
He also could not enter one as a seven-year-old with his sisters, for the same reason a seven-year-old could not sell monster materials without a great many questions being asked about where they had come from and how the child had obtained them.
He told Clara his plan. She looked at him, looked at the guild hall, looked at her own hands.
'How old?' she said.
'Seventeen for you. Fifteen for Lyra. Fourteen for me.'
'That's a significant adjustment.'
'It's an illusion construct. Same principle as Saya's ring. Intent-activated, tied to your appearance only, nothing that shows in a magical scan unless someone is looking very hard.'
'Will it hold?'
'I built it. Yes.'
Clara considered this for approximately three seconds. 'Do it.'
He built the constructs in a quiet corner beside the bookseller's cart, one for each of them — subtle adjustments, the kind that added years without adding strangeness, the specific changes that made someone read as older without looking wrong. A little more height. A little more set to the jaw. Slightly different proportions that the eye would process as adult without being able to articulate why.
He looked at Clara when it was active.
She looked seventeen. It was unsettling in a way he filed away as not important.
She looked at her hands and then at her reflection in the glassmaker's window across the square.
'I look good,' she said.
'Yes, we all know your very beautiful, Clara'
'Hmph.' She straightened her coat with a blush on her cheeks. 'Let's go.'
◆ ◆ ◆
The guild was organized chaos with good furniture.
The main floor had a board of postings, tables where groups of people were studying maps or eating or arguing in low voices, a bar that was technically not open until noon but had two people at it anyway, and a desk at the back where a bored-looking woman with a scar across her chin was processing paperwork with the efficiency of someone who had been doing it for years and had run out of things to be interested in.
She looked up when they approached. She looked at Clara. She looked at Lyra. She looked at Arthur.
'Materials sale or quest registration,' she said. 'Which.'
'Materials,' Arthur said.
'Family group?'
'Yes.'
She pulled out a form. 'What have you got.'
He set the first items on the desk — the organized collection from the months of pit sessions and personal hunts, the pieces he had pulled from his spatial pocket that morning and divided into three portions so that each sibling had their own legitimate sale. Thorn Wolf pelts. Stone Boar hide sections. A Spine Bear claw, which made the woman behind the desk look up briefly. Ironwood Forest Drake scales from the deeper second-layer hunting, which made her look up again with more interest.
Lyra had her collection laid out beside his. Clara had hers, which included a Flame Ferret pelt she had technically earned herself through a pit session that had gotten away from the intended format, and which Arthur had preserved carefully because it was good material and she had earned it fair.
The woman assessed. She made notes. She named prices.
Arthur negotiated two of them because he had absorbed enough trade knowledge from his father's interactions over the years to know which figures had room in them, and because the Drake scales were genuinely rare and the first number was low.
The woman behind the desk looked at him with slightly more attention than before. She adjusted the Drake scale figure. He accepted it.
By the end each of them had a small purse of coin that was their own, earned fair, and the woman filed the paperwork and stamped it and said: 'You hunt near the Veiling, then.'
'Near the edge,' Arthur said.
She looked at the Drake scales. 'Edge is a generous word for where those come from.' She handed the paperwork across. 'Be careful in there.'
'We are,' he said.
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