Inside the store, Jace found a tall scaly woman dressed in black clothes, of a general style he recognized as having been fairly common in Keeper’s Cove: things that had once been fancy but now weren’t. She seemed to be quite engaged with the shopkeeper, a squat and spiny fellow.
Jace slipped to the side to make sure that he was seen, but didn’t try to interject himself in between the disputants even though it didn’t sound like any actual business was getting done. To Jace’s Faresian-raised eyes, faded elegance was still elegance. The only sort of nobility that did business with the common shopkeepers of the Cove or frequented its hilly tavern was tarnished nobility, and those who could no longer get the time of day in the courts of the inlands still expected a certain amount of deference from the low-lives who dwelled out near the rim of the world.
The store itself was even more cramped than its placement squished down in the ground might have suggested, with more books than Jace had ever seen in his life crowded onto its shelves.
Although as that would literally mean that there were more than six books, perhaps it would be best to simply say that there were a great many books and leave it at that.
“Look, would it help at all if I showed you my credentials?” the woman said, her hand drifting towards the hilt of the long sword she wore on her hip.
“Don’t… don’t you be drawing steel in my shop,” the bookbinder said. “It’s not a matter of credentials. In fact, if you’ve got credentials then I can’t sell to you. You want one of my, er, colleagues upstairs.”
“They won’t deal with me because I’m not in their bloody guild,” the woman said. She reached for her sword again. “As my credentials would show you, I belong to an entirely different order.”
“Just you be keeping your mitts away from that sticker!”
“Sticker?” the woman echoed. “Very well. Fine. I won’t touch it.”
She held her hands out over the bookbinder’s counter, palms down. There was a flash of light and then a clang as her sword appeared beneath them, to fall and clatter against the counter.
“You see,” she said, pointing with one very long finger in a line along the blade. “If you read the inscription, you’ll see very clearly that it states that I am Iskondra Devalion, bladebonded magus of…”
“I know wizardry when I see it, and I can’t sell to wizards!” the spiny man said, throwing up his hands. “It’s worth more than my life. So take your sword and your magic and your commission and go have one of your friends take care of it.”
“You. Boy,” Iskondra said as she picked up her sword. She hadn’t looked around or acknowledged him in any other way. “Tell this gentleman that you have a book that needs repairing.”
“That’s not going to work either, Miss,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head.
“Why not? Do you think he’s a member of this benighted guild?” she asked. She whirled around to face Jace so quickly but so precisely that she hardly seemed to move at all. “How about it? Are you a mage, boy?”
“No,” Jace said.
“Of course not,” she said. “You’re clearly some sort of errand boy, and I have an errand for you: I need you to engage this man to repair a book for me, posthaste.”
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