The signs on the other side of the gate looked promising, and the smells even more so. Cal followed them out of the Scribe's Quarter and down into the outer sprawl, where the buildings tucked their shoulders in close and the street noise thickened into the mundane racket of people getting on with their evening.
Every window he passed showed a tableau of people sitting elbow-to-elbow, and servers threading between large crowds. He walked past three places that would have done fine on any other night, but his social batteries were running dry, and he didn't feel like being packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers. Continuing on, he tried to ignore the protestations of his body and his stomach as he pushed to find a better option.
A smell caught him at the mouth of a side lane. Braised meat, filled with the pine-resin bite of a spice mix he half-recognized from Gareth's kitchen. His feet turned before his head did.
The sign over the door was carved in the flowing, twisting hand of the Mycari. No common tongue anywhere on it, not even a courtesy translation on the jamb. Thal's teachings from Meriel supplied the name anyway: The Green Table. Cal weighed the door for half a breath, decided his stomach outvoted his hesitation, and went in, after stowing his bow and spear in a void ring when no one was looking.
The room kept talking as he entered, but something subtly shifted. A pressure change, the kind Thal had grown up feeling in many rooms he entered in Deadfall. Almost every face was Mycari. Green skin in a dozen shades from moss to jade with long ears at every table. The whole room shifted a fraction of a degree toward the door and then, having taken his measure, pointedly ignored him; if not outright glared in open hostility.
Ah, nothing like a warm Mycari welcome to make me feel right at home. At least I won't have to deal with any more socializing.
He could have turned around, but the braise smelled like Gareth's sixth-day supper and he was going to eat it. Mycari racial proclivities were nothing new, and even then, he'd noted Mirathra to be far less hostile in that department than Deadfall. So, he took a small two-top against the wall out of the main traffic lane and set his pack against the leg of his chair.
A server crossed to the table nearest his with a carved cup of some dark liquid and traditional bread on a wooden tray, murmuring a greeting: val'menara. It meant "traveler's welcome." The little formulaic phrase every Mycari house threw at its own. The table murmured it back in response. She turned, saw Cal already sitting, and her face closed down by degrees until there was nothing left but a scowl.
She came over eventually, sans the greeting and bread.
"What can we bring you?" she demanded.
"What's good tonight?"
"The stew should be simple enough to please you."
He kept his face pleasant. In another life, or an earlier version of this one, he'd have taken it and thanked her and eaten the stew. His stomach was still on that side of the argument, because he was sure the stew was what reminded him of Gareth's cooking. But the rest… the rest of him wasn't content with just that.
"I'll have the braised elk in resin-butter," he said, after glancing up at the chalk board menu. "Whatever green you're pairing it with. Aaand the dark bread if there's any left."
Her eyebrow twitched, once. "Very well."
She left without repeating the order back. Cal watched her thread between tables and drop a tray with the welcome-bread at a new party of four, laughing delightedly at something the greybeard at the head of the table said.
Around the room, groups came and went in the ordinary flow of a moderate dinner rush. Two Mycari in rough traveling leathers settled up their bill at the bar and headed out. A family of five arrived and were greeted at the door by name. At a table halfway between Cal and the back wall, four men in the plain, road-scuffed gear of traveling adventurers ate steadily and spoke little; one caught his eye for a fraction of a second and then went back to his bowl.
The food, when it came, was excellent. The stew he'd rejected sat nostalgically in his memory, but the plate that arrived instead was an argument that he'd ordered well. Elk cheek falling apart under his fork with the resin-butter reduced to a lacquer against the meat, and wilted forest greens with a sting of vinegar under the fat. The bread was dense and yeasty and studded with the little black seeds he'd sifted in Gareth's pantry. Whatever the front of the house thought of him, the kitchen was not going to embarrass itself.
Eating ravenously, he felt his shoulders drop one notch after another. He pulled the dwarven primer out of his pack and set it against the water pitcher for a stand, then started working through the phonetic key while he chewed. For a while, the room and he reached a truce.
He was on the fourteenth page of consonant clusters and chasing a bite of bread around his plate for the last of the sauce when the door opened. Two Mycari came in first, neither breaking stride. A third soon followed. And behind them, dusting off his sleeves as he entered, came Loric Thane.
Cal felt his stomach drop.
Old fear attacked him before his brain got the memo, as he simultaneously broke out in a sweat and stiffened up. He remembered the Reaping Festival crowd at the Hearthsong Inn, a coat being smoothed, a gold coin tapped once against dark wood and the words "please give my regards to Miss Veil." Then the scene was gone and the man was here, in a brown traveling coat this time and surrounded by a room of Mycari who greeted him by name.
Cal quickly shifted his eyes back to the primer, doing his best to surreptitiously take stock of the situation while he pretended to study letter forms. There was one door to the kitchens and another to the back hall, and Loric's party was between him and the front. Four in the group counting Loric himself, and the pressure coming off the second one from the left made Cal's passive senses feel like he was standing too close to an open flame—Peak D tier, at the very least. He clamped down hard on the impulse to actively scan them, knowing that people could obscure their true strength through aura control, just like he could suppress his for stealth.
He also tracked the group by peripheral vision and the polite chatter of the room, which parted for them without a word. The server who'd spurned him now jumped to meet Loric's party and guide them to an open table at a curtained alcove in the back, quickly delivering the welcome ritual that Cal had been denied. Loric took his cup with a bow of the head, clearly used to the custom.
The fixer who Zarven had kept on retainer now walks into a Mycari restaurant in the capital and gets the welcome-cup by name. Jakob told me this was coming.
Cal kept his head down. The plan was simple: sit still until they were seated, pay, and get the heck out of dodge.
The pattern of the room shifted around him, attention reorienting all at once as people got back to what they had been doing. Loric's arrival had drawn every eye, and when eyes swept back, some naturally crossed the half-elf with the primer and the empty plate. Most people quickly ignored him and moved on, but at the table of four in road-scuffed leathers one man leaned toward another and spoke something. The other man looked up.
Cal only caught the whisper as it began to travel from table to table, accompanied by shakes of the head and glares. The story of the name. Of the half-breed from the Reaping, the one who beat the Blackbriar boy. The one they say killed him.
He turned another page and didn't look up, getting more anxious by the second as he waited for the server to return so he could settle his bill.
Which was exactly why he was still looking down when Loric, tables away and half-hidden behind the alcove curtain, tilted his head at the murmur going round. Cal felt the tilt more than he saw it. He glanced up, one careful glance under his brows, and caught the instant the man's attention snapped to him.
Loric stared for a three count and then set his cup down on the alcove table, said a quick word to his companions, and stood.
Crumb.
The fixer crossed the room with confident strides that Cal remembered all too well. A faint smile touched his lips that never reached his eyes. Cal set his fork down and closed the primer over his right index finger to hold his page, all the while reaching down to the hilt of Bael'zhar with his left hand and holding his power at the ready.
Cal used the time it took Loric to approach to observe the companions he had left behind. One was a slab-shouldered Mycari man with the scarring of an old tattoo along his jaw, half-erased and half-visible in the runelamp lights. Beside him was a woman with silver at her temples and a jade earring shaped like a leaf, eating with a fork held in the reversed grip of someone who had spent more of her life holding knives point-down than proper cutlery. And the last, closer to the curtain, rested his burn-scarred hands on the table between bites.
Loric stopped at the empty chair across from Cal and rested one hand on its back.
"Would you mind terribly if I sat?"
Cal considered several answers, most of them impolite, before resigning himself to seeing how this played out. Part of him wanted to split the man in two right then and there—the man who had orchestrated and overseen Jakob's torture. But the merchant was safe, and Cal most definitely would not be if he made such a play. Not here. Better to avoid attacking, although feigning civility was more than he could stand.
"Do what you want."
Loric drew the chair out and sat smoothly, folding his hands on the edge of the table. Cal noted the manicure and the golden signet on the right ring finger that hadn't been there at the Reaping.
"You look well. Survival seems to have agreed with you."
"Yeah, living tends to have that effect on people."
"Yes." The smile deepened by the smallest possible increment. "Quite agreeable indeed. You are much less cowed this time as well. May I be direct?"
"Please."
"When Master Mault died, every open contract he held ceased to exist, and that includes the one that pertained to you and my obligation to it. I hold no claim or interest in your person or your affairs. I represent no one who does. I thought you should hear that from me, given that we've found ourselves in a shared room once more."
Cal watched him intently. The man's delivery was flawless, and Cal couldn't detect any tic that would give away a lie. He held steady eye contact, seemingly calibrated to the exact degree of sincerity the moment required.
Every word of it might even be true, Cal. But you'd be an idiot to believe him. Still, it's better than drawing steel in a room crowded with folks who'd rather see you dead than enjoying a meal.
"Furthermore," Loric glanced at his hands, then back to Cal. "I am aware of the events in Deadfall. The Veil siblings managed what many would have considered impossible. Master Mault was a man of considerable power." He flashed a bit more teeth. "Their apprentice, therefore, is a man one should approach with clarity. So, allow me to be clear: the matter is closed. There is no lingering business between us."
Cal held his face perfectly still and neither of them spoke for a while, content to take each other's measure.
"What brings you to the capital?" Loric asked, after long enough that the question came as courtesy.
"The Adventurer's Guild." Cal shrugged, the answer rehearsed out of habit at this point. "Registration, contracts. You know, the usual."
"Ah. A vast city for it, but a good one. You'll find the work varied."
"That's what I hear."
Loric inclined his head as if that settled it, which, in his private ledger, it evidently did. He raised one hand in the barest gesture. The server, Cal's server, who hadn't glanced at his table since the plate arrived, was there in the space of a breath with full tray held at her hip.
"The gentleman's account, please," Loric requested. "Add it to mine."
She didn't so much as glance at Cal and instead murmured a figure that was certainly more than Cal's meal should have cost. He noted the surplus without reacting to it. Loric didn't seem fazed either, instead drawing a purse from an inner pocket and counting coins onto the table's dark wood: three gold and two silver, with the last coin tapped once against the wood on its way down.
Loric slid the stack a handbreadth toward the server. She took it, bowed a shade lower to him than the coin required, and vanished.
"A pleasure to have cleared the air," Loric announced. He stood and smoothed the front of his coat with the flat of both hands, offering a slight incline of the head. "I wish you well in your endeavors, Mr. Valorn."
Cal nodded back. "Sure."
Loric turned and walked back to his alcove.
The return walk was as unbothered as the first. Cal watched him go as the man paused for a moment near the table with road-scuffed travelers and exchanged a quick greeting with the men sitting there, before returning to his group. Loric parted the alcove curtain and folded back onto his chair, seeming to pick up the conversation as if he had never departed. The burn-scarred hands lifted a cup to a mouth Cal didn't see.
Cal ignored the ongoing drift of parties coming and going as he sat with his hands flat on the table, letting himself breathe. The fear that had grabbed him at the door was receding—a thing measured against an old version of himself who wasn't in the chair anymore. The man who'd approached him hadn't changed, but Cal certainly had. He'd put three D-tiers in the ground with his own hands and walked away from worse situations than this one. The voice that had turned him to ice during the Reaping didn't carry as much bite tonight.
But do I trust him?
He turned the idea over. Loric was a professional, and professionals didn't waste effort on grudges that no longer paid. With Zarven dead and the story of Deadfall painting Cal as the apprentice of two C-Tier killers, the pragmatic play was exactly what Loric had just performed: close the account cleanly and walk away. Reopening it served no one.
Cal allowed himself a private exhalation. It felt like setting down a pack he had been carrying too long, as he let himself release the thread of fear tied to the man. There was still Herod to worry about, sure, but otherwise his issues in Deadfall seemed to be coming to an end.
He pocketed the primer, shouldered his bag, and rose. On his way past the server station, he caught the woman's eye and gave her the bright smile of a satisfied customer, because the win, tonight, was his. She looked away first.
Cal stepped out into the full dark of Mirathra feeling lighter than he had in a long time.
Y'all, this chapter is due in a little less than 7 hours (as I'm drafting this note) and I've just finished. I don't remember the last time I've been this behind on the schedule. New job is a lot.
I hope you've all had a great week and have been enjoying the story. I totally just wanted the bookseller to be an illithid, but noooooo, Wizards of the Coast have to have a copyright... so we got a little creative. Totally fun, though.
I'm excited for next week's chapters, and will do my best to get them out on time while trying to deliver the edits I've been working on.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
Jon