Chapter 2, pt.2: Negotiations
Of ale and gifts, friends and trades, overflowing market tables and trying to gauge what one might be able to afford. Also: Simply having a good time.
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This here is the sixth part in a series:
Chapter 2: Trader’s Coming, Pt.2
[Negotiations]
Everyone forgot about it in the evening, though. And a good thing that was. I’d already been hard-pressed to come up with a plan for the evening, much less the next day. Ma and Da would find me clenching my fist some time soon. I had to eat, after all, and sleep. I could only eat in the inn with the others for so long, Tay paying for us all.
But, as if by some miracle, the traders came that very evening—and that ensured, of course, that no one was looking at me anymore. Everyone was now focused on the little caravan—or rather what, to me, back then, was a very big one—of wagons slowly trailing into the village and setting up show right in the middle of the free space of mud ‘square’ in between the huts, in between the village head’s bigass stone house and the smaller one that framed it from the other side. The one those two Elders owned who were whispered to be Snake believers, with that carved eye on their door.
They were the only ones who rarely even came out for the traders.
Maybe because the husband was rumored to be a trader himself and rarely at home at all. No idea what his wife did the whole time. It wasn’t as if they were important to me at the time, you see, little as they ever showed up in my life. So, I didn’t even ask. The Snake thing… even that is one I only learned later, I think.
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The one thing I had learned rather soon was that I wasn’t supposed to stand at their door for long, trailing the carvings with my grubby little fingers. Had got a good lesson from Ma about that, like I got about other things so often, my butt still remembering for quite a while, so I never went there anymore.
It was how I got stuck with Ferrick, other than his connection to Anur who’d been a friend to me first—if I wanted to trace carvings, there I could. His family didn’t mind a lick if I stuck around for a bit, happy enough that Ferrick brought any friend home at all instead of just running around in the mud with Anur the whole time.
Especially if it meant he showed interest in his family’s main occupation, and carving very much belonged to that. His father was a woodworker and carpenter, after all. He made anything that was made out of wood for the whole village; from huts and the wooden stuff inside the huts right down to helping with the boats. Ferrick’s family were the only ones who could, too, it seemed. So, his father tried rather much to get Ferrick interested in that, which wasn’t always easy. But carving? Carving, Ferrick had always liked well enough, especially when he found it would get him admiration from the other kids if he made little figurines, no matter how badly. Or carved pictures into wooden boards that his father would proudly use for doorways or tables, telling everyone about how his youngest had done that, and didn’t he do it well already? Look bright, he’d make a good carpenter one day, after all.
I think he was a little worried about his son and how Ferrick rather liked mud flinging and blowing up stuff a bit too much. Even going as far as meddling in kitchens—not really to help, but to find out how to make stink bombs…
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As expected, Ferrick was pestering the traders again about anything they might have that one could use for further experiments and tinkering.
He, too, was counting in fish these days. He’d learned from the former years that the traders weren’t much interested in the big stuff his family made that they would’ve had to lug around back through the Deep Forest. Unless it was crates or an additional barrel. They wanted most of their space for the fish barrels and vats, and little else.
Jannai was a bit luckier that way—even the traders could appreciate some of the smith’s stuff. I wondered if there were places full of woodworkers, where carpentry wasn’t as rare as it was in our fishing village. I mean, we were a village mostly full of fishers. The axe people seemed to be all woodcutters, mostly. It stood to reason, there would be more villages focused on other trades, right?
Made me wonder if the traders all came from the same village, too. Had to be a really strange village. Traders had to travel a lot, after all. It would mean they were rarely ever at home. So was their village a ghost town, most of the year?
Bern had a few stories about ghosts that weren’t too bad. Though Uhland had better ones, of course. I wondered if Bern wanted to apprentice to Uhland. Though I don’t think his father would ever let him. He expected his sons to take over fishing, once he got too old. Feed the family. It was a bit of a conundrum.
Theoretically, we were all free to choose whatever interested us, and what we could find a teacher for. The latter was more of a problem.
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I myself had basically given up on learning anything but fishing in my life at the ripe age of four. There was no one who would even teach me cooking, you see. I had tried once. Ma never let me near the kitchen again after that, rattling on about what a mess I had made, whenever Da brought it back up. These days, he didn’t even try anymore either. So I was squarely stuck with nets.
Truth be told, I wasn’t really that much interested in working a household anyway. The stuff Ma did looked rather boring. The one good thing was that she rarely seemed as busy as anyone else. Had a lot more time fiddling her thumbs, other than carrying around Feréll, it seemed to me, what with all the things she had us others do. But what did I know… Anyway, if it meant having to do the cleaning, too, I wasn’t sure that was a good trade at all. I hated cleaning.
It was the one thing she sometimes made me do, despite the mess I made and no matter how I coughed. Clean out the fireplace. I guess she just didn’t like doing it herself, either. Well, there was one thing I couldn’t blame her for.
Though I quietly very much grumbled about having to do it in her stead, even though I hated seeing anything of Ma in myself, like the grumbling. But I grumbled more in my head. That didn’t quite count, did it? I never grumbled out loud at people. Not since I’d seen what reactions that caused.
So, I didn’t grumble about the nets either, though I had come to hate those, too, ever since the big one broke apart and I had to sit with it for days, bleeding fingers or not. But Ma was now slowly starting to hand responsibility for my little brother over to me, too, sometimes. The one good thing about that was that it got me away from our hut. Ma didn’t care much where I took him, long as she got her hands free.
Less nets. Yay!
But I always had to get back to them soon enough. Not yay so much.
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Bern and his older brother Bertram on the other hand could very well have gotten into the woodcutters’ trade, if you asked me. They were only a few years older than us, but already really strong. I could imagine them apprenticing to Jannai’s father, too. Didn’t think he’d be loath about some more help in the smithy. He always had a lot to do and rarely even came around for the axe people’s visits—though he didn’t need to either.
They all came to him in the evenings anyway, you see. Because he had one more passion besides smithing: He brewed a very strong, dark beer.
Cutting Ale, people had come to call it, and sometimes Hackney. What they meant was that it hacked the feet right out from under people, sooner or later—mostly sooner—even the woodcutters’, as if someone had made one clean cut. Somehow, they still loved it despite that. Praised it a lot, did the axe people. Maybe because it helped ‘em get funny. They liked being funny. And since none of them got mad when they drank, like some of ours did, why not?
We’d snuck away some of the Cutting last year for ourselves, or rather Jannai and Tay did. Tay, of all people! Can you imagine?
I have no idea how Jannai talked him into that, but she did. If anyone could talk someone into stuff it was Jannai. Even when it came to our almost prissily virtuous Tay. That had been one of the few times he didn’t take responsibility for what we’d done afterwards. Couldn’t, you see. He’d been happily snoring in a corner at that point, while most of us others were… in varying states of disarray or outright violently sick, like I’d been. Jannai’s Da had just shook his head and softly laughed when he found us like that.
“Hope that’ll be a lesson to y’all,” was all he’d said.
Implication obvious: Keep your grubby hands away from adults’ stuff.
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I’d sworn back then that I would NEVER drink beer again. Not ever.
Anur had joined me in that, back then. But he’d violated the vow almost right away, when Ferrick had started teasing him about it just a few days later, slowly sipping from the milder beer his mum had at the inn.
They also seemed to have forgotten all about last year’s incident by now, because I’d caught them planning another trip into the smithy’s basement just yesterday.
They apparently went through with it, too. I don’t know if Bern or Bert or some of the woodcutters had set them up to do it, but Anur still looked quite green today whenever he saw someone waving around a likely tankard or horn—some of the axe people used the horns of the animals some of their village kept at home, according to rumors Jannai had brought to us, as drinking tools; made me wonder how they were carved out, or if they were naturally hollow once cut off, but even Ferrick didn’t know.
Ferrick wasn’t all too talkative today, either. And later than he’d ever been to a Traders’ Coming, not even counting that he hadn’t been all too enthusiastic about the latest mud flinging; which probably saved me from some harm, considering, what with my own little problem.
Wasn’t as green around the nose and all queasy as Anur was either, surprisingly—since I’d wager Ferrick must’ve drunk more than the other boy; he always tried to out-do anyone in just about everything, if a wager was involved, after all. Maybe there hadn’t been; though it was hard to think there hadn’t, since if Jannai didn’t put one up, it was usually Ferrick who did, and more so wherever Anur was involved.
It was a whole thing with them. Seemed to be their way of expressing friendship, I guess, as strange as that seemed to me.
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It seemed they had either not invited Tay this time around—because Tay was already ruffling through the traders’ stock with a vengeance, as if he meant to empty his father’s coffers in revenge for the latest slight—or Tay had politely declined.
But since Jannai had said nothing of it… She’d usually have invited me, no matter my vow, if that had been the case. She invited me to just about anything.
So I guess they’d kept it between the two of them this time.
Jannai was currently busy debating with Tay about some of the things they’d spotted. Though I already knew she’d go for sweets with whatever amount to barter her Da had given her this time—he always did, just like she always went for sweets in the end, despite how she always ogled most everything else before going there. And there was a lot to ogle this time. True to Ommá’s words, there were a whole three of the merchants who’d apparently joined forces—a rather sensible thing to do for the hazardous journey through the Deep Woods. Though each set up their own stall, putting them spread out next to each other in a kind of semicircle right in the middle of our village ‘square’ that was actually no square at all. A thing I often puzzled about whenever I saw it at other times, but not now.
Usually, I should’ve liked to join my friends in exploring all the things the traders had brought this year.
Especially with there being so much more to see and explore than usual. Yarin, our very own sole shopkeeper—more of a general store selling hawker’s goods—ever a practical man, had even started to sell cloth and colors and small, flexible reeds for crafting lanterns back to our people at the chance, telling them “we need to celebrate this occasion, show the merchants our city is cultured, so they’ll come back next time”. Opened a workshop for those who didn’t yet know how to do it, too, sending his long-suffering assisstant Earnest running back and forth with materials. Like near always, he made a face befitting his name. But he’d somehow still succeeded at rallying people and roping seemingly half the village into that lampion business.
So, by now we had cloth lanterns hanging at every second house, to make a proper festival out of the arrival of the traders since they’d been spotted by some enterprising souls—likely some of the Youngsters hanging out where the Olders and Elders couldn’t see—some hours earlier. I still wondered how Earnest succeeded in talking so many Olders into it. He’d even convinced some—probably Tay’s father Warmun most of all, but possibly also Anur’s mom or even some of the fishers—to put up some scenting oils and scented potpourri of dried flowers and acorns and those porous wood things that could keep scents for months here and there, “to make the village more inviting” and “present our best face to the merchants, so they might come back more often”.
Seemingly he had just as much of a ‘silver tongue’ as his mentor. Yet another figure of speech that puzzled me, though not as much since Yannai had told me it referred to his tongue bringing in silver, not the tongue being silver. He did have a better mind for numbers than Yarin, far as I knew. Or at least some of the neighbors said so, a bit sad about it. Making me wonder if they’d cheated Yarin in years past. Normally, the merchants were supposed to be the one ripping people of. So had Yarin been especially bad at that… or was Earnest just helping him do it even better?
It seemed a disloyal thing to do to the fishers for someone who’d been one of theirs before, in any case, or so those same neighbors sometimes grumbled, but then again, I guess he didn’t have much of a choice. He couldn’t afford Yarin kicking him out. Whatever the case, the seller’s house sure did look far nicer by now than it had done before he acquired Earnest’s help; despite the amount of his many endeavors not having been less before. Though, when it came to beauty, I had to admit, the lanterns definitely did make our village look nicer. The soft light painted even the oldest wooden hut in joyous and flattering colors, seeming rather effective at hiding any rough spots and flaws, where the wood had aged badly and splintered. Nice for looking at, if not so nice for avoiding splinters. Hopefully the merchants wouldn’t try leaning on some rickety planks that weren’t quite trustworthy, or I guess the effect could turn out rather badly for all of us. For now, though, they stayed safely with their wagons and the improvised stalls made from foldout tables at their sides.
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And what all the merchants had assembled there! They had indeed brought much more than usual, and a greater variety, too.
My eyes bulged at seeing all the wares laid out, even from afar, a riot of colors that wasn’t solely due to the lampions: Whole bolts of cloth this time, along with the more usual wares of spices we we’d rarely ever get otherwise, and vegetables that either didn’t spoil fast, were preserved in some way, or still fresh, picked up from the villages closest to us and spread out along the way. There were also gayous stripes meant for festivities and hairbands this time; a vast array of leather—much to my luck—and even some bright stones of various colors. Different kinds of metals, evident in different colors to the tools they’d brought along; tools more than ready to rival those of our blacksmith. Much finer workings, too: some kind of clasps and … special needles? Combs, too, though those seemed made of horn and different kinds of wood. Scrimshaw, even, along with bone and horn carvings, for handles to knives and tools, but also as clasps and knobs and … was that a pipe? Wouldn’t that just break?
The combs especially, worse than even the slender pipe stem, or whatever that was. Maybe it was a handle for some painting tool, after all, though I didn’t know why someone would use something as delicate as that for a tool used all too often. It all looked like things most people would keep as a family treasure, in some sturdy box and stuffed away in a cupboard to only show to the occasional visitor or bring out on feast days. Might be they were supposed to be. Marriage gifts, maybe? Something to hand your children when they left the house, to remember you by? Though not everyone did that. Not all could afford to. And the children here never went far anyway. So what was the use of gifting them some precious heirloom that had no real use, when they lived just next door or around the corner, ready to visit you every day?
Whatever the case with that: Those were certainly not our usual traders come to visit. Maybe they’d gotten lost along the way, took the wrong turn? Most all of their wares were fine as I’d rarely ever seen other than at the Snake lovers’ door, what with how rarely Ferrick’s dad and older siblings had time for that. And Ferrick wasn’t yet old enough to be any good at it, or maybe he would’ve made some, if ever he became good enough at carving to make the finer stuff.
He sure seemed to be staring at those rather intently, for once not only interested in whatever powders and other curious materials the traders had that might be used as ingredients for new inventions, like the pepper blasts he’d made last year—much to the scolding of his Mum, once she learned how much he’d paid for that. And more so when she learned what it actually was that he’d blasted into people’s eyes and noses by flinging small sacks that burst open on landing. Maybe more so because not all of them had even landed where they should, though I had some doubt about that.
She hadn’t seemed all too happy for some reason to see one of her neighbors fleeing to the healer’s hut with reddened eyes, cussing all the way where anyone might hear, even though it was someone I knew she very much didn’t like. At least not for long, and not afterwards. She’d been giggling about it before the other Older came back, too, along with her children. But then they talked a few words, and her face ‘grew long’. I mean not really, it rather scrunched up, but… well.
It’s just what people said, when someone looked like that. It still bugged me, but I was slowly starting to give up on asking after every little thing I didn’t understand. It was no use, and too much scolding, unless I had Jannai to pester.
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But for one, she was deep in conversation with Tay still, not even seeming to notice me, and for another… That was just as well, because it meant no one was watching me when I did my own bit of ogling—the more necessary part first, eyeing the leathers the traders had brought. Even going as far as asking them which was the sturdiest. They eyed me a bit skeptically at that.
No big wonder.
I didn’t usually buy much of anything from the traders—in my mind they were all connected somehow; so obviously the new ones here would already know that, just like our neighbors always knew all about what my Mum had had to scold about this time—and certainly didn’t look the part of someone holding silver in their fist either.
But I did.
And I absolutely needed some strong leather into which to put whatever would be left over after buying the leather.
I hoped Ommá was right and they wouldn’t take too much. I don’t know that they would cheat a little kid, but who knew? Ma always claimed the traders were all cheats, and when even Da wouldn’t speak up against something Ma said… well. There was at least some chance she was right about it for once.
It made me clutch the strange silver piece even harder. I still had no idea what to do with it, but… I just knew I had to take good care of it, and that included not wasting it. Waste not, want not, Ma always said. A wastrel will go to waste, and real quick, too.
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And if I knew one thing it was that… maybe I’d need some way out some day.
Maybe this was it. Though probably not.
I doubted the thing would get me taken with the traders all the way to the city. Or at least some other village. I could’ve asked the woodcutters, of course. They seemed nice enough. But what the hell was I supposed to do once there?
I still didn’t know quite enough about the actual fishing yet. Mostly just how to piece together a broken net again. And gut and scale fish. Badly. I didn’t know much about anything else either. Most people didn’t seem to appreciate much about how I was good at finding nice stones or feathers or other shiny, glittering things. They often even claimed they didn’t glitter. Only Ommá never said anything bad about it.
Though she did sometimes call me her little fox. Or her little crow.
I wasn’t too sure about those endearments, truth be told. Was that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? I never knew if it was a scolding, though it didn’t sound like one. I guess… foxes and crows collected beautiful things, too? I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know much about foxes and crows, other than that they rarely seemed to grace our village with a visit. And that people complained about them, too, anyway… So… likely not the best thing to be? But I didn’t yet know how to be anything else. I did, however, already know that food would have to come from somewhere.
Yet another conundrum.
I had a lot of those, the older I got.
And I was only five. I didn’t wanna know how many I’d have at fifty.
Better not to think of it.
Focus on the matter at hand, Lill. Leather. Good, strong, sturdy leather.
I guess I should’ve asked the hunter. Maybe. Surely he’d have leather, from the hunting? And it likely would be cheaper than the traders’. No one said he was a crook, either. But people didn’t… well, you just didn’t.
So, I was stuck with the traders. And no matter how they gave me those looks I probably didn’t get half of, and that the other half I couldn’t quite parse, other than that they didn’t seem all too happy about me being there—Elders never seemed quite happy about me being anywhere; my own included, so that was nothing new—or at least not so sure I’d be able to even buy it anyway, they did at least answer my questions. So, I knew rather soon what kind of leather I wanted.
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“How much?” I asked. Probably too timid.
The first just laughed and shook his head. The second gave me one of those sad looks that were probably meant to be kind. Or maybe not? It was a bit down his nose, after all, from what I could glimpse. But told me:
“You won’t be able to afford that, kid. Whaddya want with that anyway? Little kids got no reason for something like that.”
“Here”, he tapped on a different one, “if ya need shoe leather” —I had shown him my good ole trusty soles, you see, as example for what I needed; I guess he took it for me meaning I needed new soles, and that was just as well, for the moment— “you’d do better with that one.” And that was the end of that attempt.
Which meant I was kinda stuck with the third as my last hope, unless I meant to take the shoe leather after all, because that was the last of em.
I dunno, maybe I should’ve taken the shoe leather, anyway. My soles had been good enough so far. Wouldn’t that suffice? But something in my brain was now stuck on what they’d pointed out as the best one. Ommá’s gift kinda called for that. Don’t judge me, I can’t tell you why, it just did.
Not the best chances for bartering, though, if you knew someone was the only one you could get something from. I should’ve sent Anur.
Or at least Jannai. But…
I know. I know. They were my friends, but still… I didn’t know how they’d react to what I carried. I most definitely didn’t trust them to keep their mouth shut about it, and that was the biggest problem of all.
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It made me tiptoe around her stall for a while, unsure of how to proceed.
Getting lost in all the things on offer yet again, when I set out to mimic someone unsure of what they wanted, as if I had given up on what I truly needed. Maybe she’d forget what I’d asked the others while she was occupied with other customers, and I could get my request in sideways, somehow. One could hope, right?
And there was so much to watch still.
Small hand lanterns and oil lamps for one, not just candles and torches and their respective holders. A few other metal and pottery items, too. A metal teapot more beautiful than any I had ever seen, with three tiny feet shaped like claws, where the others were either the more usual glazed pottery or crafted from wood like most of what we used here. There was some kind of… small figurine whose use I couldn’t quite identify that seemed nearly translucent; made from some material I couldn’t name.
Small boxes and cases and even one bigger bowl made of something shimmering and glittering, too, that seemed like very fine stone to me, either as whole material or set into wood or pottery—shells and nacre, I would learn later, from the far-off sea I had never heard of yet and still wouldn’t hear of for some years at the time. Some boxes were decorated with tiny stones, glimmering in the light of the torches and lampions—which made it sadly hard to see which was the material’s true color and which only leant to it by the light softened and colored by the cloths that softly swung in the wind.
Good thing it wasn’t stronger… or we might’ve found ourselves dealing with a fire. That would’ve rather ruined the fun. But nothing like that happened.
The merchants had even brought fruits and sweets, not just nuts—I had no idea how they’d preserved that so well it didn’t spoil along the way, wondering about it while I nervously fingered the soft metal in my grubby little hand. Jerking back with a hot cold flash when I noticed what I was doing. What if I bent it out of shape? Would they still take it then? What if I made it all useful? Bad, bad Lili. Stop that immediately!
I forced my eyes back to the table, careful not to clutch the coin so hard, while still keeping it cradled with iron will to not lose it. This merchant had the more usual jam and marmalade out, too. And sugar for making it, though that was behind her, still on the wagon in large sacks, along with the salt in big caskets the merchants obviously wanted emptied, not needing quite as much for their brine. The fishers were all too happy to buy it as well, which seemed to make both sides happy—the merchants had probably picked it up in Mistwall as by-catch in droves, possibly even already loaded with brine (not that I could’ve guessed that at the time, but I can tell you today), which was why it was cheap enough for our fishers to rally to it. These merchants most definitely were not the usual ones, or they would’ve known to sell it for more.
Then again… maybe they were trying to drive out the usual ones, offering dumping prices because they had finally learned the secret of where the Tears came from. None of us was wise enough to understand that yet; least of all us kids. Least of all me. I could only taste the greed on both sides, along with the happy feelings everywhere.
There were even some children’s toys none of us had ever seen or thought of before. And a small assortment of instruments that brought out even Uhland for once, as if he could sniff it—though probably some neighbor had told him—even some curious rocks and salts and powders that didn’t seem to belong into the spices category, judging by the way they were laid aside, and, much more interesting for us kids as well as Anur’s family: a large pot of honey to dole out smaller portions from for good measure. The only thing missing were the more usual fare of bread and meat along with the plump, fluffy buns and the sticky sweet rolls Jannai had been eyeing and alternatively slinking around since the start, on one of the tables opposite the merchant group: not Yarin’s, but the one quickly set up by Anur’s sisters on the orders of his mum, who was no less industrious than our shopkeeper when and if she put her mind to it. There weren’t just pastries either, but all kinds of baked and cooked things, even Adelaide’s famous honey candies.
She had probably recruited help from the neighbors to achieve that specific feat.
I couldn’t imagine how she and her two daughters would’ve made all that in just one night and the last few hours, even if they’d worked all night through. Because most of that hadn’t been here the day before. Had she gotten even earlier notice about the traders than our seller had? Maybe she’d just been stacking her bets, not even expecting the traders at all, what with the woodspeople and charburners all here already, sure she’d be able to sell it off.
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But speaking of sales… it was high time to attempt my own purchase, or I’d never dare ask anymore. So I waved to the merchant until she finally noticed me again, obviously truly already having looked past me. At least that side of my bet had paid off.
“Bisuar,” I told her, in dim hopes of any likely answer being what I wanted. “Just need a scrap, really. Got any scraps you can’t use for sumthin’ else?”
Sadly, she gave me a good long look at that, and when she finally opened her mouth to speak, she seemed like to hand me a similar answer as the last one, judging by the looks of it. But at that very moment Anur piped up from the side, interrupting her.
“Bisuar leather? What the hell you need Bisuar for?”
Stopping the woman’s words dead in her throat. Probably wanted to ask the same.
But Anur didn’t sound judgy. He never did. He just sounded curious.
He only turned his head for a sideways glance, though, when he stuck his head into our ‘conversation’, and then his whole demeanor changed.
“Oh,” he said, pronouncing it like some revelation I had no fucking clue where he was taking it from. “Oh. You mean for that.” As if it were some secret he suddenly shared.
As if he’d seen me pocket Ommá’s coin and seen something more than just that. As if he could somehow intuit what it meant to me, even when I myself wasn’t sure about that. At all. I couldn’t have put into words why it was so important to keep safe. Or why it had to be Bisuar leather now, and good sole leather just wouldn’t do.
His head snapped around to the trader woman again, and he seemed to grow two heads taller, the way he pumped his chest up.
“Well, it’s definitely gotta be Bisuar. Nothing else will do.”
She eyed him, too, if somehow far less skeptically than me. Maybe it was the way his clothes were better, though I didn’t understand that back then.
“Surely you’ve got some scrap you can throw in with all the stuff our inn is buying from you?” he asked, all innocently, though with something in his tone that… seemed to imply things beyond my ken.
The trader woman seemed to get what he meant, though, her arms falling down out of the crossed hold over her bosom she’d maintained so far. “Guess I can give it a look,” she replied, with that hesitation that seemed to be part of the bartering. “I won’t promise anything, though.”
“That’s alright,” Anur piped, all jolly. “We’ll just ask one of the others then.”
As if he hadn’t heard or seen me just talking to the other two already and being sent away. Although, in all truth, he actually might not have. In hindsight, though… I guess it wouldn’t have changed much if he hadn’t.
Anur was already a very good actor back then, though little did I realize it.
The demeanor of the woman, somehow, miraculously, changed as well now. “No, no. Let me have a look out back. I’m sure I can scrounge something up.”
I gave Anur a quizzical glance when she proceeded to turn back and scramble up into one of the wagons they’d all half-formed into impromptu stalls by letting down the boards on the side and back meant just for that. How the hell? I mean… she’d just said she wasn’t sure she even had any scraps. And she’d meant that. Why did she now lie about being sure she did have some? It was clear she wasn’t sure about that at all. Did she mean to take some from one of the others? I had no idea anymore what was going on. The way Anur smirked and winked at me didn’t help either.
“Just trust me,” he whispered.
Well. I guess I had to. I just hoped he wouldn’t look too closely when it was time to exchange goods… because I wasn’t buying in fish. I couldn’t.
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“What’s going on with you two?” another voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Found something interesting?”
Oh noes. My muscles clamped down instantly, making me want to duck. I normally very much appreciated my milk brother being around; Tay was a good sort, after all, but… right now I needed nothing less than him there.
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Verstehst du Deutsch?
Psst. Die deutsche Version ist schon weiter als die Übersetzung;
da es sich bei ihr um das Original handelt ;)
Du findest sie hier.