The still house existed on paper now, which made it slightly harder to ignore.
Alric had spread the drawings across the last surviving stretch of table, pinning the corners down with whatever had been within reach and heavy enough to argue with curling paper.
Around them, the inn continued its slow defeat. Stromni stood over the drawings. He had been standing there for some time.
He had not grunted. He had not corrected a line like he normally would. He had not muttered about proportions, heat, copper thickness, or the strange human belief that a straight line on paper could become a straight line in wood. He had simply taken the sheets, arranged them in front of him, and begun reading.
Alric found that worse than disapproval.
The drawing showed the old inn stripped down into a still house, not in the vague, merciful sense of “a room with a still in it,” but in the much more alarming sense of a building arranged around heat, movement, drainage, repair, and the possibility of mistakes. There were lines for flow. Routes for wash. Markings where timber needed to be removed. Notes around the chamber walls. Cooling feed. Drainage. Access space. Emergency water. A separate area for finished spirit that was far enough from the still to make Alric sleep slightly better and not far enough to make Stromni call him an idiot.
Stromni looked from one sheet to the next. Still nothing. Alric lasted another twelve seconds.
“Well?”
Stromni did not look up. “Aye.”
Alric waited. Stromni turned one drawing slightly, studied the chamber line again, and said nothing else.
“Aye is not a…” Alric said trying to find the right word.
“Aye,” Stromni agreed.
Alric folded his arms, then unfolded them because it made him feel like a man waiting for judgement, which he was, and that annoyed him. “Is something wrong?”
Stromni finally looked at him.
“Aye,” he said. “Several things.”
Alric closed his eyes briefly. “Good. Excellent. That is somehow worse than silence.”
“But not things that stop it.”
Alric opened his eyes.
Stromni tapped the drawing with one thick finger. “That’s the part I hate.”
He leaned over the page again, his beard nearly brushing one of the notes. “It’s horrifying.”
Alric stared at him. “The design?”
“Aye.”
“Because it’s bad?”
“No. Like the things ya come up with, it’s too clever by half.”
“Because it’s dangerous? What’s the issue?”
“It’s a still house, lad. It’s meant ta be dangerous. That’s why ya draw all this nonsense around it, so it only kills fools who work very hard at being fools.”
Stromni shifted the drawing, then tapped the main chamber. “It’s horrifying because it makes sense.”
Alric hesitated.
“That,” he said slowly, “is normally the goal? So what’s the issue?”
“Ya keep doing it.” Stromni looked over the pages again, his expression caught somewhere between irritation and reluctant approval.
Alric frowned. “I make things make sense?”
“That ya do it after making everything too big, too strange, and too late.” Stromni tapped the drainage line. “This here. Most would put it wherever the floor allowed and curse it for twenty years. You put the floor around the work.”
“That’s just obvious.”
Stromni gave him a flat look “Only to you lad, no one thinks like ya do.”
Alric disliked that look. It had begun appearing more often lately, usually after he said something he considered reasonable.
“It is obvious,” he said with a shrug, but also a small grin.
“Aye. Obvious things stay undone because they cost money, space, pride, or effort.” Stromni tapped another note. “You spend all four like ya found a leak in someone else’s purse.”
Alric opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Stromni continued. “I don’t trust this because it’s brilliant. I trust it because every mad thing ya build works for the same reasons. Fool gets tired, fool makes mistake, so ya leave room for tired fools.”
“That is called planning. Also you like it don't you?”
“Aye, I do, but somehow ya plan for fools.”
Alric rubbed a hand over his face trying not to smile. “I’m solving problems, Stromni. That’s it. I’m not seeing through the world. I’m just looking at where something will go wrong and trying to put a wall, drain, door, or bucket under it before it does.”
Stromni nodded. “Aye. That… and I couldn’t ‘ave done it better if I’m honest.”
Alric tilted his head slightly finally seeing the real issue. Pride.
Stromni rolled the drawings together with sudden decision. “Right. We do it.” He said avoiding eye contact.
The sentence changed the room, something in the air shifted from discussion to consequence.
Stromni turned toward the men waiting near the rear doorway, men Alric had not noticed gathering there. That in itself was alarming.
“Mark the inner wall first,” Stromni said. “Not the beam. If any of ya touch a beam without me saying so, I’ll nail your boots to it and call it support.”
The workers moved.
Alric watched as charcoal marks began appearing on the old inn walls. One man lifted a hammer. Another began shifting a stack of furniture no one had used in weeks. Someone asked whether the panel beside the rear room was structural.
Stromni turned slowly. The question was not repeated. A first blow landed against stone and old timber. Dust jumped from the wall. The still house ceased to be hypothetical.
Alric felt it in his stomach, a small drop that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with commitment. He had destroyed rooms before, in the abstract. On paper, destruction had a neatness to it. In person, it had splinters.
Stromni tucked the rolled drawings under one arm. “I’ll handle the destruction.”
“I should probably stay for—”
“Lad, this is the easy part. Ya already did the hard part. Lemme have a piece o’ this thing we building. Ya also got bigger problems.” Stromni pointed toward the barrels crowding the room. “First, we need all these damn barrels out of my distillery.”
“Your distillery? This is still technically my house.” Feeling a smile creeping in properly.
Stromni glanced at the wall now being marked for removal, carrying a grin of his own. “For how long?”
Alric nodded, “Alright, I know you'll get this done. I need to move the barrels then.”
“Later.” Stromni waved toward the front. “First, ya go play dress-up and view the new house. Crown’s not waiting because ya found another way ta fill a room with drink.”
Alric was trying to think of a quip enjoying the banter, but Seren appeared between two stacks of barrels before he could finish. Stromni grinned in victory.
She did not so much enter as emerge, carrying a folded paper, a small writing board, and an expression that suggested time had become personal.
“We are late,” she said glancing between the pair.
“Alright, lets get this over with.” Alric said glancing at Seren, he still said it with a smile.
Stromni had already turned away and was shouting at someone about the difference between breaking a wall and massacring its children.
Seren stepped sideways through a gap between barrels that Alric would not have considered passable by a person with bones. “We have the tailor first. Then the house.”
Alric just nodded, turning to the door.
The tailor was not on Moreen’s premises.
Moreen sold cloth, Seren explained on the way, with the tone of someone explaining that water was wet and Alric had somehow entered business without learning this. Tailoring was different. Good tailoring was very different. This was where Moreen had his better pieces made, which Alric took to mean he was about to meet a man who knew how to make clothing expensive in layers.
The shop confirmed this almost immediately.
It was not large, but it gave the impression of size by making every surface compete for attention. Bolts of cloth stood along the walls in deep, heavy rolls, arranged by colour in a manner that suggested the tailor had strong feelings and expected others to respect them. Reds rich enough to start arguments. Greens like polished beetle shells. Blues bright enough to be seen from the river. Gold trims, violet panels, patterned linings, embroidered edges, and enough weighted fabric to clothe a procession or stop a small blade if folded properly.
Alric stopped in the doorway. The shop smelled of cloth, oil, and money. He distrusted all of it.
A man approached from the back with a measuring cord around his neck and three pins held between his lips. He removed the pins with one hand, bowed neatly, and looked Alric over in the rapid, professional way of someone who could insult a shoulder measurement without speaking.
“Mister Alric,” he said. “I am Terven. Mistress Seren sent word.”
“Did she?”
“She did,” the tailor confirmed, his eyes already moving over Alric’s coat, boots, stance, sleeves, and the areas where travel, work, and stubbornness had left evidence. “We have very little time.”
“I keep hearing that.”
Terven clapped once, softly. Two assistants appeared from behind a curtain. Alric looked at them.
They looked at him with the brisk neutrality of people who had seen worse and been paid not to remember it.
“This way,” Terven said.
The back room was smaller, warmer, and contained a raised wooden platform, two stools, a long mirror of polished metal, several shelves of folded cloth, and far too many hooks.
Alric saw the platform and immediately disliked the direction of events.
“You are not coming in.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Mister Alric.” Came from Seren on the other side of the curtain.
Terven cleared his throat with great politeness. Alric surrendered.
A few minutes later, he stood on the platform in his underclothes and socks, feeling that life had taken several wrong turns in sequence.
Terven circled him with the cord, his expression thoughtful. He measured shoulder, chest, arm, wrist, waist, hip, thigh, and something near the neck that Alric felt should have required warning. The assistants recorded numbers without visible judgement, which he appreciated right up until one of them corrected the angle of his arm as though he were furniture.
Then Terven stopped. He was looking at Alric’s feet. Alric looked down as well.
“What?”
“What are those? I’ve been looking at them and never seen it before.” Terven asked.
“They are socks.”
“They have shaped heels.”
“Yes.”
“And no wrapping ties.”
“No.”
The tailor’s expression changed. Not excitement. That would have been less worrying. This was interest sharpened by profession.
“May I see one?”
Alric shrugged before awkwardly removing one and passing it over.
“May I make you proper cotton ones?” Terven asked holding up the the sock like it was a sacred relic.
Alric considered that a moment “If you going to do that I’d like a lot of them, my staff would like them as well. Wait, no. I mean I’d like a few pairs for me but I want to buy a bolt of soft cloth once we done.”
The tailor straightened slowly. “You are unusually committed to feet.”
“I have lost many things since coming here. I am not losing socks.”
There was a pause. Alric didn’t say it, but Mara had made these for him, that counted for something.
From beyond the curtain, Seren said, “Are those sock things he wears a problem?”
“No,” Alric said.
“Yes,” Terven said, at the same time.
Alric looked at him.
The tailor smiled faintly. “Not a problem. An opportunity.”
Terven’s gaze shifted, still thoughtful. “Do you have more ideas like these?”
Alric opened his mouth to say no.
Then he thought about the rest of what he was wearing. He closed his mouth.
The tailor noticed.
Alric sighed. “Do you have paper?”
Terven had paper.
Twenty minutes later, the royal appointment, the still house, the barrels, the demolition, the house viewing, and most of the kingdom’s concerns had been temporarily displaced by underwear.
It was not Alric’s proudest moment. It was, however, one of his most satisfying.
The first attempt had been wrong in three places, alarming in one, and structurally optimistic in a way that made Terven purse his lips. The second was better. The third involved cutting up a test sheet, muttering over seams, and Terven calling in an assistant who had been sent away again almost immediately after asking one unnecessary question.
Alric stood on the platform wearing a hastily made pair of briefs. They were crude. The fabric was not ideal. The seams would need work.
They were still the best thing that had happened to him all morning.
Terven stood back, arms folded, studying the result with deep seriousness.
“It removes excess fabric,” he said. “Better under fitted trousers. Less bunching.”
“Practical.” Alric said with a smug expression.
Terven nodded as though a minor law of civilisation had been uncovered. Alric allowed himself one small moment of triumph. The curtain shifted.
“Does,” Seren asked from outside, “measuring always take this long?”
Alric’s triumph died quietly, replaced by irritation. Terven looked at the paper patterns. Then at Alric. Then toward the curtain.
“We are innovating,” Alric said with a quick wink to Terven, who missed it studying the underwear still.
Seren did not answer. Terven clapped twice.
The assistants returned with enough speed to suggest they had been listening.
The actual measuring resumed with renewed aggression. Numbers were taken again. Posture was corrected. Alric’s shoulders were discussed as though he were not present. His arms were apparently longer than expected, which sounded vaguely accusatory. His stance was adjusted twice. Terven made a mark near his collarbone with chalk and frowned at it until Alric began to feel responsible.
At last, he was allowed to dress.
He had barely finished tying his boots before Seren drew back the curtain.
“We need to pick cloth Mister Alric,” she said.
Alric followed her out, already wary. The main shop had not improved while he was in the changing room. It remained bright, heavy, and convinced of itself.
Terven moved first toward a deep red brocade.
“No,” Alric said.
The tailor paused. “You have not seen it properly.”
“I saw enough.”
Seren gave him a look. “Merchants of standing must show prosperity. You cannot attend the palace looking plain Mister Alric, you are a merchant of some standing.”
Terven lifted a rich green cloth with gold threading. “This would suit your colouring.”
“I don’t want to be visible from Trade Town.”
Seren exhaled through her nose. “A successful merchant who looks poor looks weak.”
“A successful merchant who dresses a curtain looks like a curtain.” He said with a frown at the bright cloth.
Terven lowered the green.
Seren’s eyes narrowed. “This is not the brewery Mister Alric. This place has fine walls, maybe I should discuss this with one of them.”
He held up one hand. “Enough Seren, this is cultural. If we are doing this, we are doing it my way. That’s final.”
She stopped. Terven stopped too, but with less curiosity and more despair.
Seren’s expression shifted. The irritation did not vanish. It rearranged itself around interest.
“Cultural?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“From your home?” she asked to which Alric nodded.
The tailor’s shoulders lowered a fraction, as though he had just lost a legal argument in a language he did not speak.
Alric stepped past the bright rolls and pointed toward the darker shelves. “Black.”
Both Seren and Terven looked at the cloth, then at him.
“Black?” Terven asked, “For court?”
“Then dark blue.”
Terven lifted a navy bolt, though he did so with the expression of a man humouring a fever. “This?”
“Yes. That. And…” Alric scanned the shelves, then pointed. “That one.”
Terven followed his gesture to a blue-green cloth bright enough to be noticed but not loud enough to start a fight. “A small amount.” Alric said
“How small?”
“Less than you are thinking. Small embellishment at the pockets.”
Terven glanced at Seren for support but it never came, she was watching Alric curiously. “Pockets? The palace will be full of people who understand clothing.” Terven said.
“Then they can understand restraint. The fabric can be expensive. It does not need to shout about it.”
Terven made a small, pained sound.
Seren studied him. “And in your culture, successful merchants wear black?”
“Often.” Alric said thinking of the suits in his previous life. “In my culture, a man may show status through cut, fit, material, and restraint. Not only colour.”
Terven looked down at the black cloth again.
Alric reached for a fresh sheet of paper. “Here.”
He drew quickly, not beautifully, but with enough confidence that the shape emerged before the imperfections mattered. A jacket first. Structured shoulders, fitted through the body, clean lines. Trousers to match. Beneath it, a dark navy shirt or underlayer, high enough to fit the local sense of modesty but simple enough not to become separate. The turquoise appeared only as trim, a controlled line along the cuff, collar, and front edge of the jacket.
Terven leaned closer.
Seren did too, though she tried to make it look like inspection rather than interest.
“No panels?” Terven said. “No embroidered front? No contrast sleeve?” Alric shook his head through the whole exchange.
“It is plain. For a palace inquiry.”
Terven stared at the drawing longer. Alric waited.
The tailor took the charcoal from him without asking and altered one line at the shoulder, then another at the collar. He narrowed the jacket slightly, adjusted the fall, then added a note beside the trim.
“If the cloth is poor, this fails,” Terven said pointing at different parts. “If the cut is ordinary, this fails.”
Terven gave him a sharp look, then returned to the drawing. Seren watched in silence.
The tailor’s frown changed slowly. Not approval. More like a man discovering that a locked door had opened inward the whole time and deciding to resent the hinge.
“It is plain but,” Terven continued, more reluctantly, “if everyone else is over-dressed, this will stand out.”
Seren looked at him.
Terven tapped the drawing. “Good black cloth. Very good. Navy beneath. Turquoise only here and here. It would look foreign. Deliberate. A bit severe, perhaps, but not poor.” He paused. “Annoyingly confident.”
Alric did not smile. Seren noticed that he did not smile, which was almost worse.
“You see?” he said glancing at her with a raised brow.
“I see,” she replied, somewhat meekly looking away.
Terven gathered the drawing, then the selected cloths, already issuing instructions to his assistants. “I will need you back for a fitting in a few days. Earlier if possible. The undergarment pattern also needs refinement.”
Alric’s attention sharpened. “Yes. That. Refine that.”
Seren closed her eyes briefly. “The outfit, Mister Alric?”
“Both are important. One is for the palace. One is for morale.”
Terven, who had the survival instincts of a man who dressed merchants for a living, did not comment.