Thoroughly unnerved by the comment, I made my way to the closer of my two possible destinations, the caravansary. My feet pitter-pattered across the cobbles, and I realized I should probably add shoes in.

I made my way around toward where the caravans gathered, trying to find where the travelling merchants might be. Sometimes they had stores, sometimes stalls, and sometimes they decided that you came to them and just ran the shop out of a cart.

I would look over my shoulder, and spot a pair of eyes, reflective and too intelligent, and my paranoia would take a turn for the worse, but I could never tell if it was the cat I was thinking about, or if it was just a cat or even something else.

It certainly hurried my paces, though, and gave me the kick in the metaphorical pants I needed to cross into the section of the city that was more wagon than building.

I almost didn’t take it in; the feeling of being followed and watched was so great, but I did once I got near enough to a crowd.

There were some animals, and I made sure to avoid any bad-looking pavers as I slowed my walk and took it in.

Wagons, massive wagons and mini wagons. Hand carts moved goods between the warehouse and stand, where wares wowed the weak-willed, women warded wicker wares. Wholesome wives wandered where wicked wavers waved, worked, and weighed wares, withering working wallets.

“Wowza,” I said.

It was bizarre, or rather, a bazaar, at least of sorts.

There weren’t stalls on a street where people moved, this was a place where people came to get goods, contribute to the economy, overall, line a merchant's pockets.

It was a place for merchants, by merchants, and it showed.

Stalls displayed goods, small signs showed prices, people haggled, which against a [Merchant] was pure folly, and little parts showed agencies.

Some people used skills to draw attention, the mana of the skills feeling like a tingle.

It was all at once, an overload, I felt like I wanted to look everywhere, and I did as I walked, though none of the goods were what I was looking for.

Different grains, some ground, some whole for cheaper, fruit kept stable from all over by skills, some that were not even in season, there were followers I had never seen before in stalls next to potters.

In some areas, those where two different companies came in contact with one another, there were people selling the same products, trying to suck money away from one another.

There were sheets out overhead to diffuse the light, not so important in spring unless it rained but adding to the feeling of comfort when it would come to summer.

I ignored it, looking for the company that I was looking for. Sometimes, I would get pulled over by a skill, but when I started to think about spending money on a vase, or a pot or whatever, I stopped and let my wisdom pick the temptation apart.

I isolated the feeling and cut it loose before spurning [Shopkeepers]. More than once, when they played a big wammy on me, or in one case when they got me to buy something, a simple bundle of herbs I could have sworn was simple dry mint, while I was on my way through, I would shout something about how the other side they were competing against was far cheaper, which got them to quit it for a while.

I kept moving through the crowd but managed to spot a tiny bit of cloth that flapped in the wind, a coloured strip with West Wind, which was all I needed to start bushwacking my way towards the green strip like a lost man would by the north star.

I was brought up short.

“You there, discerning madam, [Take a look], [I’m sure you’ll like it], [My Wares are fine as Thread].”

My head, now full of a want to check on wares, diverted me to a stall just across from where I was planning to go.

I approached and looked the man in the eye, who immediately winced and started sweating.

He let out a [Charming Smile] and gave me his [Best Pitch].

“Ah, young lady, have I [Caught your Eye]? I can swear, my grain is fine, though not so fine as you. I can see you eyeing my fine maize. Look at its colour, all ripe, fresh from the fields of the Albrecht flats, sweet, you can eat it right off the cob.”

The maze was quite intriguing, it’s mostly yellow, not the tinier multicoloured grain I remembered. His skills drew me in.

I could make some food with this… surely… And it does look nice. Unfortunately, it has no crunchy kernels, I wouldn’t mind popping some. Maybe I can dry it? Either way, I bet it would taste good.

“Sweet, you say?” I ask, like a moth drawn to a flame.

I can afford to splurge on this… It’s not something they have around here, maybe I could see if Anna wants to grow some… Each of those is a seed. If I buy a few baskets of them, we could get both, eat the maize, and eat it too, and still have some to plant. And look! There are baskets right there.

A tiny, nagging voice, way, way back inside my head, reminded me to slow down. And I did, looking at the price and the signage.

It was far too costly for what was delivered. Freakishly high, even, for some simple grain, even as juicy as it looked.

“As you can see, as the decerning customer you are, the maize is kept fresh by-”

“Why is it so expensive?” I asked him, cutting off his [Best Pitch].

“Well, it is from the flats, miss, it is a great distance away…” he stated, letting out a fake laugh as he continued, “Why, the amount of space it takes up, the weight, and keeping it fresh is quite costly, you see-”

I had him on the back foot, and he lost his charming demeanour, the change immediate, like the snapping of a thread. One moment, he was charming, the next he was just a greasy merchant making up reasons for his ridiculously high grain price.

I was being swindled, and for the first time, I noticed the [Merchant] himself instead of just his smile, his smile with a tooth missing. He waved greasy, sweaty hands, his hair dirty from weeks on the road. None of those were deal breakers they didn’t affect the food, but they did mean you had to wash them extra well. He looked like he hadn’t had a bath in a long while, and smelled foul.

I did not like getting messed with like that, not by merchants, not by anyone.

He had an uncomfortable air about him, and it was more than a smell.

He was greasy in the way slimy people were, too, the way he looked at me was the way someone looked at their food, only his food was fighting back now.

He was trying to rip me off, though they are quality…

My mind was picking apart each skill at a clipped pace, and I was recognizing it, slowly but surely, so I decided to start poking to give me more time to do it.

“So they’ve been a long way, I can understand that, but are they clean?”

He stumbled as I cut him off and started looking annoyed.

“Of course, it’s clean, it's preserved. Are you even listening, miss? Look here.” He blustered, reaching down and picking up an ear and shoving it in my face. Ostensibly to show off how clean it was.

It does look clean, it’s quite the… Wait, that bit is off-colour…

[Take a Look] and [Caught your Eye] backfired, the focus they made me pay on the ear shoved so close, making me pick up every detail. Including details like a few slightly puffy, grey/blue kernels.

“What are those grey bits?” I asked him, raising my voice so that others might hear, putting him on the spot.

I was somewhere between trying to wrestle the skills and pull them apart from the inside, and the other half of me was fine with buying the maize, even with the colour.

I knew what they were, they were totally fine to eat… All though… No one listening would know that.

He started blustering, quickly looking at the ear, quickly taking it in, and cancelling his skills, letting the spots fade, but it was too late, I had already seen it.

The effect of his skills was all but gone, my mind free from the heavy hit, the remaining were coming undone at the seams, the skills the man had laid on me growing weak. I had to wonder just how many people he had gotten with that combo.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

They look like smuts, not bad, but what could I say… What’s the worst thing I could say more like it, I should set an example after all, invasive skill use like that is just plain wrong.

“Are those Witches Spurs? They are! Your selling poisonous grain? You’re unbelievable. Who do you think you are? Get that out of my face,” I told him loudly.

He looked around, his face growing angry. He was losing control of the conversation, and he knew it, and worse than that, he was being watched.

The casual crowd, those not totally enthralled by the products they perused, were turning to look at him.

I had him, not all the way. I didn’t have him by the balls and over a barrel, but I bet I could.

My social stats were garbage for charisma, but I had a bit, just a smidge of intelligence bouncing around between my ears. I wasn’t trying to convince anyone, I was just trying to smear him, which was way easier. Take the truth, and just warp it a bit, and then use the stats I had to try and explain why ‘witches spurs’ were bad.

“Now, listen hear-”

“You listen here,” I told him, “selling poison like that, and to a woman no less. If I were pregnant, that could have killed the baby! It could still kill someone. You monster!”

All true, ‘witches spur’ was used to end pregnancy and caused delirium and vomiting. If you caught ergotism and were alone or had no water, you could die from dehydration. No lies so far.

He was taken off guard, still angry, but starting to weigh his losses, he started looking around and realized that most of the audience were working women, homemakers and cooks.

It hit me then, as his eyes flicked to the maize, that he had no idea I was messing with him either, he wasn't fighting for narrative, he was trying to fight his way out of a corner.

Then, he opened his mouth, and I had only a second to prepare myself before he said something rather unacceptable and not something I had readied myself for.

He spoke with the feeling of a skill to him, that automatic way someone did something, but for his voice, only he was more desperate, not thinking clearly, and like anyone not thinking clearly, and talking on auto pilot, he said something stupid.

“Well, someone has to keep you in check. You people breed like rats.”

He murmured it, just loud enough for others to hear, but not loud enough for everyone to hear. And the moment the line slipped out of his mouth, it couldn’t get taken back.

His fellow merchants, the ones in his company that were close enough to hear him, started looking at him like he was lighting his wares on fire and was eyeing them to spread it.

They started to try to guide their shoppers away, quickly trying to finish their transactions before the angry shoppers could backpedal, before they could leave with their money.

That… Actually pisses me off. And I don’t feel like turning the other cheek, not this time... It's just too far out of line.

I started to loom over the shopkeep. I was bigger than him, I was bigger than most people, and I decided, for once, to use that gods-given height to impress upon him that he had just made a very, very dumb mistake in opening his mouth, and ohh did I loom.

His eyes widened as I leaned in over him quietly, and when I spoke up, it was a quiet thing, very quiet and very calm. “And, just what is that supposed to mean?”

He looked up at me as I intruded into his space and made to open his mouth, but I quickly stopped him, placing one finger in a shushing motion over his lips.

“Ah, ah. No talking. You are very, very lucky that I’m not going to seek retribution for that. I’ll settle on destroying your reputation instead,” I whispered to him, “But mark my words, if you, or one of your company’s goons, ever uses a skill or talks that way to me again, I will haunt you till the end of your life, and when you die, you’ll get no afterlife, because I’ll never send you to meet Death. I will stack you up in a cabinet, or maybe a jar, or perhaps a little basket, and you will waste away there until the end of time because I’m a [Saint of Death], and I have no people left… Nod, if you understand.”

He hesitates for a moment before nodding slightly.

“Good,” I told him, tone forced back down to a normal, less horrifically threatening, but still acrid tone, “Good day,” and left, the last skill he held on me broke, snapping from me almost audibly and eliciting a flinch from him as he quaked there.

I crossed the narrow street to the West Winds company’s closest stall and smiled with a hell of a lot of teeth.

“Hi there. I want to talk to your manager. Which way is Gunther?” I asked the somewhat frightened-looking man, with a big, stupid grin on my face.

He wavered a bit, and I remembered to tuck my teeth back in, humans got spooked by that.

It didn’t reassure him.

Dang it... Strause makes it look so easy.

***

I left the hubbub behind, following the [Merchant] I had talked to through the stalls and away from the scene of my threat. We skedaddled, almost fast enough for me to hear the sound of my feet tip, tip, tapping on the stones. The nails on my feet gave off a tip, tap like light chimes, as I walked with my nails extended for just a little more stability as if I could somehow dig them into the brickwork like soft loam.

I couldn’t, but the kind, very frightened [Merchant] didn’t seem to mind the clicking as we made our way to a building with a larger sign that read The West Winds Caravan Company.

“Thank you very much, kind sir. Sorry for imposing on you, but I think I can find my way from here.”

He looked at me like a rat, spotting a tiny cube of cheese and checking for traps that might catch it and deny it a prize.

“I’ll be fine, go on, you’re free. I just want to go talk to Gunther, it has nothing to do with you,” I told him as comfortingly as I could.

He half nodded once and nearly sprinted, his whole body put behind the motion of running as fast as he could away from me.

He didn’t even run in the right direction. I was between him and his stall, and instead of running around me, he ran the opposite way. I watched him run until buildings and carts and crates blocked my vision of him.

I wasn’t that scarry… Right? Surely, I hadn’t intimidated him so badly he would sprint from his stall and just ditch. The racist salesman, maybe, but the guy watching?

“Am I scary?” I mumbled to myself as I wandered to the building.

The door was unlocked, and it led into a lobby, where a homely secretary sat, sifting through documents, writing things down on a separate page.

It was a rugged wooden building with a few chairs and doors inside. There was little in the way of much else. It was the opposite of homely, a kind of nowhere space that you got from a building that was left unused for long periods of time, with no significant personalization.

The secretary and her desk were the only signs of life in the building I could see in the big, open room.

I walked up to her and tapped on the desk to get her attention.

“I’ll be with you in a minute.” She told me tiredly, her eyes never leaving the paper.

She looked tired, the poor girl, like she could use a pick-me-up. She was tired, bags under her squinted eyes, as they traced over line after line of random, cramped text.

I waited, I had time, her hand looked cramped, and the desk, like clothes one size too small with all the stuff on it. She was cross-writing on one of them, the text would be a terrible pain to read. There was a weariness in her posture like she was a cripple about to be sent to a killing field.

She wrote like she was sending one last letter to an unrequited love. Feverish.

She picked up speed as she wrote, faster and faster, until she stopped, turned the page, and started to continue.

“Um, I hate to be a pain bu-”

She looked up at me and shushed me before looking back down and continuing to write.

I shut up and just waited.

She finished her letter and placed it off to the side primly before looking up at me.

“How may I help you?” she asked me board.

“I’m just here to talk with Gunther. I promised to buy from her, and I have some stuff to buy, figured I would come and keep my promise,” I told her.

She looked at me balefully, “Gunther is in a meeting right now, I’ll have to ask you to wait. Unless you have an appointment?”

I sighed before shaking my head, “I’ll wait… I’ll wait.”

So wait I did, sitting down for a bit, tapping my foot on the wood building, and then, after a while, I paced back and forth. I kept doing so, wearing a hole in the floor intermittently until a familiar set of faces walked out from one of the doors.

They were a familiar pair, though one was more familiar than the other.

A goofy grin and a calm face beside him that I had seen only once before, and not for very long.

Strause and Clause, if I wasn’t mistaken.

They had that familial resemblance going for them, a similarity in their hair, face, and eyes. I could see the resemblance to Anna, and having seen all three of them, I could honestly say that Anna wore it better. There was a harder cast to their features that Anna lacked, and the softer features brought the whole thing together, though I supposed might just be them being men and Anna being a woman. They were both well dressed, though Strause was a little dressed down.

He had a way of standing out, while his older brother looked oddly normal, like a man standing next to a glowing jester might. He was on the taller end for a human, standing on equal footing, maybe 5’ 11”, a few inches taller than Strause.

“Oh, hi, Strause,” I said to him.

He looked over to me and away from his brother, noticed me and gave a little wave.

“Hello, imagine seeing you again,” he said, surprise in his voice for only a moment before it transitioned into, “It’s been what? Like thirty years since I last saw you? My, how tall you’ve grown, it feels like just yesterday you were arguing with a little girl.”

He kind of mixed his voice, first like we were long lost friends, before taking on a foe motherly tone.

“You sold the surprise and the first bit, but the motherly bit could use some work,” I told him.

He clicked his tongue, “Drat. Well, good to see you come, quickly bro-”

“Dear heavens, what is wrong with your eyes!” Clause said, his hand reaching down to where a sword might sit. He said it not with shock but something more like a statement.

He had no such sword, but he stood his ground, planting his feet like someone who knows how to fight.

Me and Strause acted at the same time, both turning to him and throwing up our hands.

“Whoa there, Clause, that’s Beth’s new friend, you know, the one that caused a fuss? Calm down,” he said, moving in a way that mirrored the way one might try to calm an animal.

I, for my part, with the tension of the day wearing down and thinking about my clothes, of all things, said, “Don’t do it, my dress is a gift,” in the same tone someone might when they’re telling someone to not knock over a vase.

He took everything in without blinking, the whole world focused on him for a moment as he read the situation with no change on his face nor to his eyes.

I couldn’t even see him twitch or smell anything, no fear or anything.

He was a blank slate, and I couldn’t read a damn thing from him.

He stopped reaching for the sword that wasn’t there. And composed himself, brushing off the hem of his very expensive-looking tunic.

“I see,” he said very carefully as his words tip-toed over thin ice.

There was very little of Anna or Strause in him… So, very little.

“Is she doing well?” he asked.

“She gained, like, seven or eight levels yesterday, so a little sore from all the stats, but last I saw, she was having a fairy tale… er… moment. There was a menagerie of animals, and she was talking to a wolf about little Timmy falling down a well,” I told him.

“A wolf?” he asked tentatively.

“Another Timmy?” Strause griped tiredly.

Clause looked to Strause, “What do you mean, another Timmy?”

“I don’t get why,” Strause told him, “But little kids named Timmy are significantly more likely to fall down a well, like ridiculously more likely. Like I overheard last week, it was, like, the twenty-second time this year. That's like, once every few days.”

“What?” Clause and I said at the same time.

“What?” Strause said in a much different way, “Don’t look at me like that. It’s true, and little Timmy’s have some curse on them or something. Oh, don’t give me that look, it’s true. Clause remember [Lord] Vincent, his son? It was like ten years ago, but he fell down a well.”

“Oh, yes, I remember that. But wasn’t his name Tobias?”

“Huh… Was it? Yeah, I guess it was… I suppose he might just be an idiot then.”