Jace felt excited when he first set off for the bookbinder’s. He was good at things like directions, and he kept them in his head rather than focusing on the strange and unfamiliar surroundings. The streets of Montport were narrow as only a few short alleys between buildings in Keeper’s Cove had been, and they were long and winding. Though the sky was blue, the sun was nowhere to be seen and the streets were shadowed.
There were voices all around him… people chatting at the counter ledges of shops, people trading stories in the street, people shouting from the windows overhead, in languages he’d heard back at the tavern but couldn’t understand. He’d only ever absorbed the parts that had been relevant to his job… he thought he heard a word for “beef” and one for “mutton” from someone reciting a list. As much as his mouth watered for any meat that wasn’t fish, he kept his mind focused on his task… food was already being delivered to the Horizon Chaser.
In spite of his lowly station, Jace had never had to worry about going hungry for longer than a long and busy night… a consequence of working in a tavern. Sometimes Prit would give him a meal, but more often he’d been left to fend for himself with the scraps… but with no else to share, that had been plenty. Now with Sheiral and Katryn cloistered away in the cabin, Jace considered his standing to be on the rise. Upon seeing the great big hams and wheels of cheese hanging from the ceilings in the first shops he visited, Jace had made up his mind to volunteer to take care of meals. Not only would that impress Katryn with his continuing usefulness, it would give him first crack at the good stuff for once in his life.
He spotted the silversmith’s shop easily enough when he came to the end of his path, as it had a great big window made up of multiple panes with candlesticks and cutlery on display. Unlike most of the shops he’d seen, there was no window ledge counter for conducting business.. patrons would have to go inside to do their business.
Jace also saw why the grocer had made a point to tell him to look for the silversmith… the book binder’s shop was much harder to spot. It was crammed into an alley-wide space between that establishment and the tavern next door, sandwiched so tightly between them that it would have been easy to miss that there was a business there and not simply an extra door propped open for breeze.
Approaching it, Jace found that the door didn’t even lead into the shop but instead to a set of stairs cut down into the ground, with a single flickering candle in a lantern over the door at the bottom of the stairs to light the way. The steps weren’t very level or evenly sized so Jace took it slow and easy, and thus he became aware of the conversation coming from within the subterranean shop.
“…not guild-affiliated,” a man’s voice said.
“I bloody well know you aren’t,” a woman said. “Neither am I.”
“I don’t want any trouble. If you’re a mage, you need to buy from…”
“The trouble is, I’m not a mage as any of the tower-tyrants here seem to understand the term. I am a practitioner of the arts, to be sure,” the woman was saying as Jace tiptoed over the threshold of the door, “but I am a veritable wizard with a blade.”
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