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:: You're passing by the tavern on your way to the smithy :: :: when you notice one of the curtains caught on something :: :: near the window frame, slightly askew so that a sliver :: :: of light cuts cleanly out into the street. Inside, the :: :: glow of lanterns catches on on the face of a youngish :: :: woman, sitting with her back to the wall where she has :: :: an easy view of all the exits. A plate of food has been :: :: shoved off ot the side in favor of a small grey notebook.:: :: The woman's face is visible only in quarter profile, but :: :: it's enough to show a look of grim determination that :: :: gives you pause. As you glance over to the notebook, you :: :: begin to read... I've been buying from Dax for six years and he still weighs powders like he's afraid of shorting me a grain. Careful man. Careful hands. It's why I keep going back - that, and the fact that his antidotes actually work, which is more than I can say for half the "specialists" operating between here the Arctic lands. "The usual," I tell him, sliding a folded paper across the counter - my list, precise as always. He reads it without comment, and starts down the shelves behind him with the unhurried competence of a man who's done this ten thousand times. I'm in no hurry either. I lean against the counter and let him talk, because Dax likes to talk while his hands are busy, and I've learned more useful things from chatting shopkeepers than from most of my paid informants combined. Today, he's talking about his ward. "Little Kiri helped me sort feverfew all morning," he says, not looking up from the jar he's measuring into. "Good hands, that one. Doesn't forget a plant once she's smelled it once. Still jumps like something's after her if a door slams too hard, but she's better than she was." "You've had her - what, five years now?" I ask. Idle. Just keeping the conversation moving. "Six come spring." He corks a bottle, sets it aside, and for once his hands slow down; old memories taking all his focus and leaving no room for his work. "Strangest thing I've ever come across, and I've been keeping this shop thirty years." "Oh?" "You remember I used to make the circuit out past the old Yon property, before I settled here proper. Buying season, most years, I'd stop at whatever cabins were still standing out that way, see if anyone had dried goods to sell." He shakes his head slowly. "One year I come across a cabin, empty. Not 'abandoned' empty ? 'lived-in-until-recently' empty. Cookfire cold a few days, but food not yet rotten in the cupboards; cot in the corner, child-sized; little wooden toys on the floor. But no people. Not a one, living or otherwise - though I won't say the place didn't have a feeling to it that made me not want to look too closely at the woods out back." I don't move. I don't think I even breathe, for a second. "No bodies?" I say. My voice comes out even. I'm almost proud of it. "None I found, but the floorboards were stained with blood, and a lot of it." He shrugs, the particular shrug of someone who made peace with an unanswered question a long time ago. "I asked around. Nobody knew the family. Squatters, most figured, gone as quick as they'd come. I told myself the little one had been carried off by kin, or that the cot was old and there was no kid in the house when all that blood was shed. Told myself a lot of things that let me sleep." He picks the jar back up, resumes measuring, and I understand this is a story he's told himself into a shape he can live with, same way I have my own shapes for my own nights. | |