The carriage remained the same small, polished box of discomfort it had been on the way to the palace, only now it had acquired the additional burden of memory. Every jolt seemed to remind him of a different royal question. Every sway produced another part of the conversation he wished he had answered better, or not answered at all, or perhaps answered from another country.
No one spoke for a while.
Vale sat opposite him with his hands folded over one knee, posture neat despite the carriage’s ongoing campaign against dignity. Seren sat beside him, already looking less like a woman returning from the palace and more like someone preparing to convert a problem into several documents.
Alric stared at the carriage wall. The king wanted to visit the brewery. The queen as well.
That thought had been with him since they left the office. It had followed him down the corridor, out through the palace, into the carriage, and now sat beside him like an unwelcome passenger.
Vale broke first.
“Well,” he said, after another stretch of silence, “that went well.”
Alric turned his head slowly.
Vale met his gaze with the calm of a man who had already chosen his words and decided they were worth the risk.
“I think so too” Alric said.
“You were not arrested,” Vale said with a grin.
“Hmph,” Alric said, glancing sideways. “I think I should write a letter of thanks to the queen actually.”
Alric looked at Seren. She looked up at Alric blinking.
“You too?” he asked.
Seren’s hands rested neatly in her lap. “I was relieved. We can finally decline the letters.”
Alric nodded and felt tension leave his shoulders that he didn’t know he was holding. The marriage proposal letters had slowly been piling up, Seren could only stall for so long.
“I’m just glad you weren’t asked to explain socks to the crown.” Seren said after a while.
Alric opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Vale nodded slightly. “The socks would have been difficult.”
“They are good socks.” Alric paused for a moment, glancing at the pair. “If you keep giving me lip about them Seren, I’ll design something for you too.”
That got a blink from Seren and a grin from Alric.
Alric sat back or tried to. The carriage objected to the idea and pushed him half an inch sideways.
The carriage rolled over smoother bridge stone now as they descended from the palace district toward the busier parts of the city. The sound outside thickened. More wheels, and voices. More life continuing without any awareness that the king had just decided to visit Alric's brewery and make every clean floor, barrel, worker, heating stone, divine glow, and badly timed comment a possible matter of state.
Vale leaned forward and tapped the roof twice.
Alric glanced over at him.
“Getting off.” Vale said with a small stretch.
“Here?”
“At the guild,” Vale said. “The last barrels should be arriving or close to it. The grapes are done, but the accounts are not. Neither are the complaints, the transport notes, or the sellers attempting to adjust memory now that they know how much you needed.”
Alric nodded. “Memory does that.”
Vale gave him a mild look. “Says the man who bought a vineyard’s worth of grapes and now owns several buildings full of wine.”
Alric just shrugged.
The carriage slowed near the far side of the bridge.
Vale adjusted his cuffs and reached for the door before it had quite stopped, then thought better of it, because unlike Alric he seemed to understand the difference between movement and arrival.
“We need the brewery cleared,” Alric said.
“The king is not visiting a storage house,” he continued. “The wine barrels need to move. The cellar can stay full of wine but the rest has to go.”
Vale stepped down, then turned back with one hand on the door. “I will send word once I know what remains. Try not to make anything else politically complicated before sunset.”
Alric gave him a flat look.
He shut the door.
Alric frowned, something about that sentence bothered him.
The carriage lurched forward again, leaving Vale behind near the bridge road, already walking toward the guild with the briskness of a man choosing ledgers over whatever Alric did next.
“Seren, why are we apologizing for doing well?” Alric asked, struck by an epiphany.
“Mister Alric?” Seren asked blinking.
“I’m tired of trying to keep up appearances and such. All this being proper stuff is grinding my nerves.” Alric explained.
For a few moments, only the wheels spoke.
Seren watched through the side curtain until Vale vanished into the crowd. Then she let the fabric fall back into place and turned toward Alric.
There was a look on her face. Alric knew that look.
“What?” he asked.
“Is the problem,” she said carefully, “that you have a thing for dwarves?”
Alric coughed.
It was not a dignified cough. It began in surprise, struck his throat badly, and ended with him leaning forward while Seren watched him with open satisfaction.
“Seren, I’m going to put a stop to this. Who’s business is this but my own?” Alric asked having gotten annoyed at this line of questioning.
“Some of the staff have wondered if you have… proclivities.”
“Is it any of their business?” Alric stared at her. This was now the third time she had questioned him on this.
She continued, perfectly calm. “You learned your ‘official’ backstory from him. You build most of your important projects around his work, and when the king asked where you learned things, you credited the dwarves very quickly.”
“That was the lie.”
“Yes. A dwarf-based lie.”
“It was Stromni’s lie. The truth is far stranger.”
“That does not make it less… the truth?”
Alric leaned back, then immediately regretted it as the carriage struck a rut and punished his spine.
“I do not have a thing for dwarves. Although Stromni said I should explain the truth to you.”
“That is good to know.”
“When we get back to the inn but Seren, enough is enough. The king doesn’t seem to mind what we are doing, so I’m not sure I care what anyone else thinks anymore.” Alric shrugged.
Seren gave him a smile, one of the biggest ones he’d seen. “Will the truth explain your socks?”
“They were perfectly good socks,” he said. “They have shaped heels.”
“They were noticeable.”
“They were inside shoes.”
“You underestimate how often people look down during awkward silences.”
Alric opened his eyes again. “I was in a palace office being interrogated by a king, a queen, three mages, and several men who looked like they had been grown from paperwork. I was not worrying about my ankles.”
“That is why I worry about your ankles for you.”
Alric pointed at her. “I warned you earlier, I’m designing something for you.”
That made her pause.
“What?”
“An article of clothing,” he said. “So useful, so comfortable, so obviously better, that you will never complain about my socks again.”
Seren regarded him for a moment. “That sounds like the strangest threat I’ve ever heard.”
“It is a promise.”
“What sort of clothing?”
He smiled.
Her eyes narrowed at once.
“No,” he said. “You lost the privilege of preparation.”
Seren rolled her eyes and looked away, but she was smiling when she did it.
For half a street, the world almost felt manageable.
Then the carriage turned toward the lower city, where the brewery waited, and Alric remembered that manageable things had a habit of becoming barrels.
Alric returned to the tailor wearing his normal clothes, which felt like a personal victory after the palace outfit had spent an entire day reminding him that looking respectable came with seams.
He carried the suit folded over one arm. Terven saw it immediately. Not Alric. The suit.
That said quite a lot about Terven.
The tailor stepped out from behind a curtain with three pins tucked between his fingers and the expression of a man prepared to judge cloth before breakfast.
“You brought it back,” he said.
“I said I would.”
“Many men say things.”
“That sounds like something that should be stitched on the wall.”
Terven ignored that and took the suit from him with the careful reverence of a priest handling relics and the suspicion of a butcher examining meat. He unfolded the jacket first, shook it once, then held it at the shoulders.
“You wore it to the palace?” Terven asked, which got a nod from Alric. “And?”
“I survived. My clerk wants one as well.”
“That is not a tailoring comment.”
“It is the most important one.”
Terven’s mouth pressed thin, but he turned the jacket inside out and immediately frowned.
Alric pointed. “That.”
“The lining?”
“It’s scratchy.”
“It is not scratchy.”
“It is absolutely scratchy. I wore it for hours while being questioned by the king. I had time to know just how scratchy.” Alric continued before the man could defend textile cruelty. “I want silk inside.”
Terven went very still. One of the assistants at the back of the shop stopped moving.
“Silk,” Terven repeated. “Inside?”
“That is where linings go.”
Terven inhaled slowly through his nose. “Master Alric, silk is expensive. I can only get giant spider silk here.”
Terven looked down at the jacket, then back up. “Silk lining is usually reserved for very fine garments.”
“This is a very fine garment.”
“It is unusual.”
“It is mine.”
“That is becoming the same thing.”
Alric smiled faintly. “Good. Then silk.”
Terven made a small sound and looked to the assistant as though hoping someone else in the room might have authority over reason. The assistant, who seemed wiser than his age suggested, became deeply interested in a drawer of thread.
Alric looked at the table. Then at Terven.
“I have something new.”
Terven stopped. It was immediate. The pins in his fingers stilled. His eyes lifted slowly.
The socks had done that. The briefs had made it worse. Alric had watched a man who thought in seams and cloth realise that foreign absurdity could sometimes be practical. Since then, Terven had looked at him with the wary fascination of a hunter who had found footprints from an animal that might be valuable, dangerous, or badly dressed.
“What kind of new?” Terven asked, frozen in place.
Alric hesitated. That was a mistake. Terven noticed at once.
Alric looked toward the shelves, then the table, then the blank paper near the charcoal. For one brief moment, he considered not doing it. There were some inventions a man should perhaps leave alone. Some comforts belonged to the slow progress of society and not to a brewer already suspected of being politically irregular.
Then he thought of Seren walking all day in wraps, of Margaret’s stiff posture, of every woman in this world apparently having accepted discomfort because no one had yet been sufficiently annoyed in the correct direction.
He sighed. Then he shrugged.
No. I just need to never, ever own this one.
Every woman in the world would probably thank him for it eventually, and he wanted absolutely none of them knowing where to send the gratitude.
“Paper,” he said.
Terven had paper ready with insulting speed. Alric took the charcoal and began to draw. At first, Terven leaned in like a man expecting another undergarment curiosity.
Then his expression changed.
Alric drew quickly, not beautifully. Two shaped cups. A supporting band. Shoulder straps. A fastening at the back first, then he frowned and added another version with hooks in the front for easier dressing. He marked soft cloth where skin would touch, stronger fabric beneath, stitching along the lower curve, adjustable ties or small buckles if Terven could manage them neatly. Otherwise, extra cloth for ties would do.
Terven said nothing. That was unnerving. Alric kept drawing. Terven stared at the page.
“No hard edges. No rough seams. Soft lining. Strong outer fabric. It needs to hold shape but not feel like armour. Different sizes. Very different sizes, probably. You’ll need women involved in fitting because I am absolutely not doing that part.”
Terven’s eyes flicked to him. “What is it called?”
Alric paused.
Several words crossed his mind. Most of them belonged to a world that was not here and sounded strange in his head now.
“A support garment,” he said.
Terven gave him a flat look.
Alric shrugged. “Name it yourself.”
“That is cowardice.”
“That is wisdom.”
Terven picked up the paper carefully, as though it had become fragile after becoming dangerous.
“This will require testing.”
“Obviously.”
“With different figures.”
“Yes.”
“With trusted clients.”
“Very trusted.”
Terven looked at him again, and this time there was something like accusation in it. “You know what this is.”
Alric raised both hands. “I am not claiming it. Make it. Improve it. Sell it quietly. Tell people you invented it after years of study.”
Terven stared. Alric leaned closer. “I am serious. I do not want credit for this.”
“You are an unusual man.”
“I keep hearing that.”
Terven looked down at the drawing again.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
It was not a large smile. It was not even a happy one. It was the expression of a man who had just found a locked room in his own profession and realised there was money inside.
“I will need better paper,” he said.
Alric nodded. “And silk for the suit.”
Terven’s smile vanished.
“Do not ruin this moment.”-------