She looked very surprised by the scale.
She did not say anything for a moment. She turned it in her hands, held it to the light, ran what Arthur recognized as a basic magical assessment — the faint shimmer of a diagnostic working — and set it down on the counter with the careful placement of someone who had decided the thing in front of her was worth being careful with.
'Where did this come from,' she said.
'We came across them while we were out hunting in The Veiling Forest,' Edric said. He had the specific tone he used for statements that were completely true and entirely uninformative.
'Dragon scale. Juvenile. In this condition.' She paused. 'I can offer four crowns per scale. That is the standard rate for intact juvenile scale in good condition.'
'Five,' Edric said, without hesitation.
She looked at him for a moment. 'Four and a half.'
'Five,' Edric said, with the same tone.
She looked at the scale. She looked at Edric. 'Five per scale,' she said. 'I'll need to file a find record — standard procedure for the Veiling Forest region. No further detail required for specimens under five.' She paused. 'Do you have more?'
'One moment,' Arthur said.
He stepped back from the counter. Edric and Thomas followed.
They put their backs to the assessor and kept their voices low.
'We're rarely out here,' Arthur said. 'We brought five. The record covers up to five without additional detail.'
'Same transaction, same morning, same record,' Arthur said. 'If we're going to sell, now is the time to do it.'
Edric was quiet for two seconds — the specific two seconds he needed when he had already decided and was confirming it. 'Alright, all five,' he said.
They turned back to the counter. Arthur reached into the pack and secretly accessed his dimensional storage to take out three more medium-sized scales. The assessor looked at them without touching them yet, doing the count.
'Five,' Arthur said. 'Same condition.'
She counted out twenty-five gold crowns across the counter with the composure of someone who had seen significant transactions before.
The find record was updated. Five scales, Veiling Forest region, no further detail.
Outside Edric put the purse in his coat with the care of someone placing something valuable where it would not be lost. Given that before Arthur was born, it used to take him two years of work just to save up a single gold crown. Now he held twenty-five gold crowns. He looked at it for a moment without speaking.
'The east barn roof,' Thomas said.
'And the west field equipment,' Edric said. 'Plus a lot left over.'
He put the purse away. 'Let's go find your mother,' he said, and they went to find her.
◆ ◆ ◆
The clerk at the bookshop noticed them the moment they walked in.
Children were not her usual customers. The shop catered to scholars, guild researchers, the occasional wealthy merchant with intellectual pretensions — not children, and certainly not children who came in alone. She had been about to shoo them away when she looked properly at the girl with the silver hair.
Long silver hair, almost to her waist, which the clerk had never seen on a child that age. Fair skin. Bright eyes with the quality of someone who was reading the spines before she had taken three steps into the shop, cataloguing with the focused speed of someone who knew exactly what she was looking for and had very good eyes. She was, the clerk thought, the kind of beauty talked about in fairy tales.
She was likely a noble's daughter. That was the obvious conclusion. A lord's child, possibly a high merchant's, separated from her escort somehow. The clerk looked for a guard and found none, which produced a small private anxiety — a silver-haired girl that striking, wandering a river trading town unaccompanied, was the kind of situation that attracted the wrong kind of attention.
Then she looked at the clothes.
The coat was not anything she recognized from local tailoring. The leather had a quality she had not seen before — a depth of color and a surface texture that suggested materials well above the grade available in Vareth's market, worked with a precision that even the best leatherworkers in the city downstream charged significant sums for. The smaller girl beside her — blue hair and amber eyes — was wearing the same quality. Both of them. Children, in clothing that a high-ranking noble would have been pleased to own.
She came out from behind the counter.
'Can I help you find anything,' she said, directing it at the silver-haired girl.
The girl looked up from the shelf she was already halfway through. 'Monster biology,' she said. 'Forest ecology. Magical research — specifically magical theory, not practical instruction manuals.' She paused. 'And anything on large magical fauna that isn't the standard guild survey text.'
The clerk blinked. Then she led her to the natural philosophy section, which was in the back, and began pulling volumes. The second edition of the monster biology text with the additional chapters. The forest ecology compendium that had come in from the university press last autumn. Three volumes of magical theory she kept for the scholarly trade. And — she hesitated, then pulled it — the large magical beasts volume that the author had titled with the confidence of someone who had strong opinions: Creatures of Significant Danger and Their Properties.
The girl took each one, opened it, checked the index, and placed it in a growing stack with the systematic efficiency of someone running a search algorithm.
'I'll take all of these,' she said, without looking up from the one she was currently checking. 'How much for all of them?'
She named the total. It was not a small total.
The girl opened her purse, counted out the coins without hesitation, and placed them on the counter. She did not negotiate. She did not pause. She went back to the stack.
The clerk looked at the gold in her hand. She looked at the girl, who had found a corner with good light and was already cross-referencing two of the volumes simultaneously, with the blue-haired girl reading over her shoulder.
She went to the back and came back with tea and a plate of the good biscuits she kept for long-staying customers and set them on the table beside the girl.
'You're welcome to stay as long as you like,' she said. 'If there's anything else from the shelves — '
'I'll look through the rest when I finish this section,' the girl said. 'Thank you.' She reached for a biscuit without breaking her reading, which the clerk found oddly charming.
The blue-haired girl looked up from the magical beasts volume with the amber eyes that were, the clerk noted, also not entirely ordinary. 'Do you have anything fun? Stories. Not these boring information books.' She glanced at the stack beside her. 'She has enough information books.'
The clerk smiled despite herself. Whatever she had expected when two children walked into her shop, it had not been this. 'Fiction? Adventure stories?'
'Yes. The exciting kind.'
She found three. The blue-haired girl looked at the covers, approved of two, and set one aside with the specific authority of someone who had opinions.
'These ones,' she said. 'What's wrong with that one?'
'The cover,' the girl said. 'The dragon on it has the wrong number of claws. If they got that wrong, I don't trust the rest of it.'
The clerk looked at the cover. She looked at the girl. She decided not to pursue this further and brought the two approved volumes to the table with the tea.
◆ ◆ ◆