When Lucas shook the tailor’s hand and left the shop he’d planned to head right back to the cider house. Danaria, it would seem, had other plans. As he moved to get into the carriage with her, she got out on the other side and said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Uhm, back to the house?” he said, not sure where else they would be doing.

“But what about the cobbler and the barber?” she asked.

“Well, I do need a shave, but I already have good boots, so…” he looked down at his muddy boots and immediately regretted it. They’d been black once, but after so much wear, it was hard to tell anymore.

“That,” she said, pointing at his boots, “Is exactly why you need to visit the cobbler. We could buy you the fanciest cravat on High Street, but no one would believe you were my cousin without better footwear.”

She smiled at that last bit, which was infectious as always. She obviously loved their shared secret. No doubt it was great fun. It would get more serious, though, once he started making connections and snaring more addicts like her brother. Had she given any thought to how dangerous that might be for her? He wondered.

Before he could contemplate that any further, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him along to another shop further down the street. This time he met a dour faced man named Finnegan, who started shaking his head the moment he saw Lucas’s worn out shoes.

“Ya ever think to polish these even the once?” the man asked in exasperation as he examined the battered things.

Lucas stayed polite and tried the same excuses about the bandits, but the man was much less circumspect than the tailor. “You?” he laughed. “Her cousin? In these boots?”

“Distant, cousin,” Lucas insisted. “Very far removed.”

Danaria seemed quite horrified that they’d already been caught in their little lie, but before she could confess everything and apologize for leading the man astray, he interrupted and put in an order for new boots like the ones he was wearing, a higher set of riding boots, and two sets of shoes: one for dancing and the other for court.

All of that was barely more than a dragon, and once the quarrelsome man bit the coin to check it, he became a lot more biddable. By the end of the translaction, he’d even started calling Lucas "Sir," though he’d been extremely sarcastic about it.

Danaria seemed entirely impervious to such things, as only sweet, naive girls like her were. As they left the shop, she clutched his arm and said, “Wow, I can’t believe you fooled Mr. Wake like that,” she said, still giggling.

“Well, he’s a canny man, but nothing blinds like gold,” Lucas said, trying to ignore how nice she smelled as they walked across the square to the barber.

There had been a few people out and about when they arrived, but now that it was almost noon, the village had fully come to life. People were buying and selling vegetables in the few stands that made up the market.

It was a pleasant enough scene, but that was quickly interrupted when they walked into the barber shop and found the man extracting a tooth from a customer. “I-I think I’ll wait outside,” Danaria said, suddenly turning and walking back out into the square.

Truthfully he wanted to do likewise, but he didn’t want to look like a bitch even more. So, instead, he shut the door behind him and found a seat on one of the chairs against the far wall.

“Now hold still, Earl!” the barber said, readjusting his grip on what looked a lot like a wrench. “The sooner I get this out, the sooner it stops hurting!”

Lucas let his gaze drift to the window, and instead of concentrating on the screams of the man who was having a very painful sort of root canal, he looked out the window and watched as Danaria gave away copper coins to small children. It was both adorable and vaguely patronizing, but from the way they reacted, he could tell that was something she did quite often.

From the way she smiled, it obviously made her happy to be kind to them, and he doubted that she was the type to worry about counting coppers. He was just starting to imagine what it would take to get her to smile at him like that when the barber suddenly wrested the tooth free from his patient, and the barber’s chair was vacated.

“Now what can I do for you,” the bushy bearded man, asked. “Just here for a trim, or…”

“Give me the works,” Lucas told him. “I need a shave and a haircut. After so much time on the road, I’m a mess.”

Lucas spent the next half hour getting shaved to within an inch of his life while he told the man a harrowing and completely fictional tale about his travels to Lordanin. The man seemed to believe him. Not that it mattered. Lucas wasn’t so much trying to convince him as practice the story and try the identity on for size.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

A good lie took preparation and details. It required you to commit to the part, and when he finally had some nice shoes and some clothes to go with his new haircut, the last thing he wanted to be was an empty suit.

Despite how uncomfortable he was letting a stranger hold a straight razor to his throat, when it was over, and he checked himself out in the distorted mirror of polished bronze, he had to admit he looked better than he had in a long time. It had definitely been worth the quarter crown.

When he got back to the cider house, Hura’gh teased him and called him a youngling, while Adin clapped him on the back and congratulated him on becoming halfway respectable. Only Kar’gandin grumbled.

“What de ya mean? No big deal,” he fumed. “The best part of a dozen dragons on clothes?! Pffaa! Armor, I could understand. Weapons I could accept, but wool and cotton are not steel me boy, you’ve been duped!”

“What can I say,” Lucas shrugged. “You gotta spend money to make money, and when we can start selling pure to the rich assholes that Adin knows, well… I bet I can make all this back in one night of hobnobbing.”

“Pure?” Adin asked. “Definitely, but if you want someone to try it out, to, you know, make sure it’s up to snuff… What?”

Everyone started laughing at that, and only Adin wasn’t sure why. Junkie logic always made guys like him think they were being slick when they couldn’t have been more obvious.

After that, they spent the rest of the evening discussing the only real bad news of the day, which was that there were no goblins to be found pretty much anywhere.

“None?” Lucas answered in exasperation. “Really? They’re vermin. You should be able to kick over a random stone and find three anywhere in the Greenwood!”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Hura’gh agreed. “But they ain’t there.”

They discussed it a bit but came to no answers. As it stood, they really only had two choices. They could either figure out where they went, or they could try to find them somewhere else instead.

As Lucas lay in bed that night, he found it difficult to sleep. At first, he thought it was the way that Danaria had been distractingly pretty that was keeping him up. It had been a long time since he’d had a girlfriend, and since this was pretty much his longest period of sobriety on record, that thought was really starting to weigh on him.

As he thought about it, though, he realized it wasn’t how pretty she’d looked in her yellow dress that he’d been obsessing about. It was the copper bushels she’d been handing out to the people of her village.

A copper coin was literally nothing to him at this point, but for an impoverished family, it might be enough to feed them for a day, and those children had clearly been impoverished. He didn’t know all the fancy medical terms, but he could see crooked bones and gapped teeth.

Hunger was a frighteningly common problem in this world. He’d learned that in the few years he’d been here as he worked his way up from near zombie to small-time drug dealer and had more than a few hungry nights himself. It was something he’d just learned not to see after a while, but that was harder after he saw the way it pained good people like Danaria.

He didn’t even really care, but it still ate at him like some kind of emotional acid reflux. So finally, instead of letting his subconscious torment him indefinitely, he got up, got dressed, and put on his boots. Then, walking past his snoring roommates, he grabbed a basket, and proceeded to collect half a dozen healing potions that didn’t have too much poison in them and started walking back toward Meadowin.

He felt kind of stupid for doing it. A few weak healing potions probably wasn’t enough to cure any of those ills permanently, but it would be enough to make him feel better, and that was the only thing he was looking to fix right now.

Lucas took his knife with him. Technically this time of night, the roads probably weren’t safe to walk alone, even this close to the city, but he doubted anyone was going to fuck with him. Ten minutes later, he was pounding on the tailor’s door. The village was dark, but there were candles and hearths still burning in a few windows, including this one, so he didn’t feel too bad about it. He mostly just felt like an idiot for being here at all.

Mister Twee eventually looked out his window, and after a few seconds, he removed the bar from his door and opened it just a crack. “Oh, uhm, Mister Parin, was it?” the older man spoke quickly.

“Perhaps I wasn’t clear. When I said that your clothing would take some time, I didn’t mean today, perhaps next week or even—”

“Here,” Lucas said, thrusting the basket in the man’s face. “I thought you could use these more than I could.”

The tailor straitened his glasses and peered into the cloth-draped basket, but before he could ask what was in it, Lucas volunteered, “They’re healing potions. Please give one to your daughter to help with that awful cough and the rest, well, just give them to whoever else might need them in the village.”

“Healing potions,” the man said in disbelief. “And so many? No, Mister Parin, there’s no way that I can possibly afford such a—”

“I understand your financial state,” Lucas said. “And since I just paid you good gold to replace my wardrobe, you understand mine too, I’d imagine. So, think of it like this… It is imperative, or whatever, that I receive my garments as quickly as possible, and you said you’d need your daughter’s help to do that, so now she can help.”

“But there must be two dragons worth of potions here,” the man said, “I couldn’t possibly.”

Maybe like a dragon and a half if they were up to the alchemist's guild’s standards, Lucas thought, but lesser potions with foraged ingredients, we’re talking maybe six kings. Maybe.

He didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he just muttered, “Exactly, pocket change to a man like me. So take the potion, get your girl well, then put her to work, alright?”

The tailor was about to decline again. Lucas could see it in his eyes, but another terrible, wracking cough made him reconsider. Instead, he took the basket and said, “Thank you very much. I will find a way to repay you with time and quality, if nothing else.”

“See that you do,” Lucas said sternly, leaning into his role as a noble as he summoned all the limited imperiousness his shave and haircut provided him. “See that you do.”

As the door shut in his face, Lucas started walking back to the manor. His heart felt a little lighter, and now he could finally get some sleep.