“You want me to move in with you?” Danaria asked, almost spitting out her tea in surprise as the two of them sat in the second-story drawing room, chatting.
She looked at him with such shock that he might as well have asked her to come back to his place, which, in a way, he did, he realized belatedly. Even if it was by accident, the idea of cohabitating was pretty alien to the idea of the upper crust of this world.
She and Lucas had spent a couple hours there, and though the maid was there just often enough that he wasn’t tempted to do more than talk, which was fine. Danaria was a breath of fresh air compared to everyone else in his life, and especially after spending so much time with a grumpy gnome, he’d be perfectly happy to listen to her talk at length about whatever she wanted.
When he’d apologized for making her go out night after night in the cold to retrieve messages, she’d just smiled and told him about the way it felt to fly using different sets of wings. She was just always so positive and more interested in discussing the challenge that some bird had working the scraps of paper out of the crack in his window where he’d left them and carrying them off in their tiny beaks without dropping them than discussing any discomfort on her part.
Well, usually she was positive, at least. She’d blushed and switched that topic quickly enough when he mentioned stroking the one bird that he’d brought in from the cold. She immediately started telling him about how Meadowin was doing. She went on and on about the tailor’s daughter and the cobbler’s new apprentice. After that, she talked about the new greengrocer and how well the market was doing.
She would have gone on forever about the clinic that his favorite red-headed herbalist opened if Lucas had eventually stopped her and said, “I was thinking that maybe we move there sometime soon. Or, if Meadowin isn’t fancy enough, we could look at Lordanin, of course.”
That’s what caused the outburst, and she looked at him in shock for a moment before she finally managed to sputter, “Is that what you call a proposal?”
“I mean, that can come later…” he started to say before she blushed a shade darker.
“You know what? Let me try again,” he said finally because he didn’t like where this was going.
“This is not a conversation about marriage. Not today,” he said, speaking slowly and trying to get her to calm down. The idea that you couldn’t date someone and see if you were really compatible in this world and instead had to just marry them and see how it went was crazy to him, but this wasn’t the time for that discussion. “This isn’t about me, or even you, really. It’s about your brother. He’s getting married soon and—”
“Oh, but you’ll be there for the wedding, won’t you?” she asked, smiling. “I’m told it will be very festive despite the winter gloom. They even hired a mage to grow flowers and grass at the—”
“Sadly, the timing will not allow me to be there,” Lucas lied, “But I hope it's a wonderful day and you have a great time. But after the wedding, they’ll be moving here, and it's probably better for the newlyweds if we give them as much space as possible, at least starting out, don’t you think?”
“So then you’d move your—” Guilelessly, she'd started to talk about things she shouldn’t in front of the maid, and Lucas quickly cut her off.
“I’m talking about moving everything off the estate,” he quickly clarified. “You, me, Hura’gh and Kar’gandin… everything. We don’t have to live together. Not at first, but I was just thinking that we should—”
“Meadowin,” she said finally. “If I get a say, I’d much prefer to live among the people than in the city proper. It’s so crowded there.”
“Why wouldn’t you get a say?” Lucas asked, taken aback by her choice of words.
“Well, Adin, and even you tend to just tell me what’s going to happen next,” she said with a shrug. “What I want doesn’t always seem to matter.”
She hadn’t said it to be mean, but even so, it slipped between Lucas’s ribs like a knife. He hadn’t told her what to do specifically or anything, but he had gotten into the habit of bossing around pretty much everyone these days, and she was part of everyone.
I’m going to have to work on that, he thought to himself. He could save beating himself up for later, though.
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“Well, I’m going to talk it through with Kar’gandin, but I figured we’d just build something from scratch, so if you want a big picture window or whatever, just let him know, and he’ll—”
“Wait, you’re building a house… for me?” she asked, taken aback. “You can’t, Lucas. That’s really too much.”
“Well, for us, and it will have some… business purposes to it as well, but you shouldn’t have to deal with that aspect too much,” he said, smiling as he reached across the coffee table to take her hand. “This will take a long time, and I don’t think they can even start until the spring, but I’m sure there’s a cottage or a townhome we can rent for you until everything is ready.”
Danaria quickly moved past the shock and disbelief, and once she finished peppering him with questions about the whole thing, she was somewhat on board. She didn’t even seem to mind the idea of an alchemical laboratory in the basement so long as he continued to work on healing potions and cosmetic products, which he promised to do.
He wondered if the glowing screens in his head would count any of those as real potions or not. The answer to that probably lay in how closely he followed the approved alchemist guild recipes, but that made no sense at all.
When their conversation was at an end, and the teapot was completely empty, he finally left her to return to the cider house, but he only left the parlor after a very long hug. It was funny because he was supposed to be discussing an escape plan to get her away from her brother, but what he’d really ended up talking about was building a life together.
It wasn’t like that on the surface, of course, but as the conversation wound through, the minimum amount of servants a household could really get by on and how many place settings a proper dining room must have. Hidden in the sweeps of those details was a life that might easily become their life if he didn’t get himself killed dealing with the Prince, the Torvins, or whoever else might have a grudge against him.
When he told the dwarf and the half-orc about his plan that afternoon, they were fairly positive. “Makes sense to me,” Kar’gandin nodded as he scribbled some calculations down in his ledger. “We’d spend a lot of coin on the facilities you describe, but they’re doable enough, and if we paid that back by cutting our Viscount out of the loop, we’d be in a profit inside the year, and if we built a larger lab and hired more people then—”
“Well, that would be hard to hide,” Lucas said with a frown. “We pretty much own that village, but we don’t want to hang up a shingle that says drug lab here.”
“No, of course not,” Kar’gandin agreed, stroking his beard. “I was thinking, more like we pay for a writ from the guilds to open up a small shop that’s officially allowed to make potions and the like. Cassara could run it, and make it seem like it's all above board.”
“We’d be paying a lot of taxes for that kind of camouflage,” Lucas mused. “Maybe even more than we pay the Knights of Brass for—”
“Oh, we paid them plenty when we burned down that brothel,” Hura’gh chuckled. “Fighting in the streets for days after that, but as long as we keep the whole thing away from the nice parts of town, no one cares too much.”
“That’s sort of the way things are,” Lucas agreed, remembering the Prince and the cold lens he saw the world through. He probably wouldn’t care if a whole district erupted into open warfare as long as he got his cut. “Just the same, we sent a message, and now we can try to keep a lower profile. I don’t want to be fighting every gang in the whole damn city; I just want people to know that we are not to be fucked with.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Hura’gh agreed, “The only thing I don’t get is why you don’t just kill the man. Adin, I mean. Just put him out of his misery already and be done with it. We have fourteen-year-old runners working for us with more balls than that guy.”
“Aye, our misery too, eh?” Kar’gandin blurted out after that. They both laughed at that, and Lucas nodded.
“Well, I wouldn’t be sorry to see him go, but who knows what that would do to our relationship with the Whisperers,” Lucas answered. “That’s why I think we should start to diversify our shit. I’m not saying we should go legit or anything. I’m just saying we should have other backup plans and products in case, you know, the worst should happen.”
“You mean with the Prince,” Kar’gandin answered.
“Yeah,” Lucas nodded. “Who else.”
He’d told them both about some of the things that were at play with this new complication, both when he’d come back the first time and this morning, but he told them both a little more now. Mostly, that was in terms of how the Prince was going to want them to start paying a lot of cash under the table. Neither of them were too happy about that.
“So we won’t be making more if we cut Adin out,” Hura’gh said finally, “We’re just giving the cut of one asshole who ain’t doin’ shit to another asshole who gonna ain’t do shit.”
“Pretty much,” Lucas agreed, “but at least when we pay the Prince he makes the guards look the other way, so at least there’s that.”
Lucas had come out here to get started cooking up a new batch. He’d been eager to see how his new skills translated to his old equipment. He wanted to know what part of the improvement was due to his increased skill and what percentage was due to the gnome’s gear and the laboratory's location dangling in midair like that.
He never quite got to it, though. Instead, he spent the afternoon shooting the shit with Kar’gandin and Hura’gh about every topic under the sun. It was a conversation that needed to happen, of course. Hell, they were all conversations that needed to happen, and by the end of the day, he couldn’t help but feel like time slipped through his fingers.
Tomorrow, I’m going to have to do something about that, he decided. There's only a few more days before I have to head back, and I’ve got lots of shit to do between now and then.