Taliana came home one day to find that “home” had caved in.
“Exactly as I warned!” one of her aunts was shouting at one of her other aunts, as various of Taliana’s cousins worked to dig out their possessions from the mud filling what had been their burrow that morning. “Two days of steady rain, one heavy cavalcade on the road above us, and BAM! We’re lucky we got everyone out in time. I TOLD you those builders had lied about installing support beams!”
Taliana sighed, tossed aside her lab coat, and pitched in. Not surprisingly, Twigly was in the thick of things, covered head to toe in mud as she shouted orders to everyone else. “Look alive, there, Jevan!” she said. “You’ve got a bit of the wall ready to collapse if you’re not careful. Yo-ho, Marigold! The green rug’s in the muck under your paw—see it?”
“‘Look alive’?” Taliana questioned. “‘Yo-ho’? You’d fit in great with a pirate gang.”
“Great idea!” said Twigly. “Maybe I’ll go join one. Basket-weaving, it turns out, is not for me.”
“You can’t swim,” Taliana reminded her. “And you get sea-sick just looking at a body of water.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Twigly, tail drooping.
*****
After the cave-in disaster, Taliana’s family ended up in one of the city’s homeless shelters. The “plan” was to stay there just a couple weeks, while the various working members of the family saved up to pay for a new burrow to be dug somewhere. The truth, Taliana knew, was it was going to take months. She, as one of the few adults without any young mouths to feed, contributed more to the fund than all of her uncles and aunts combined.
The shelter was . . . passable. It was dry, and relatively free of crime (especially once Twigly started patrolling with a poker that she insisted on calling a rapier). The food, however, was awful. After a couple days of gagging on burnt and over-salted porridge, she started eating out for dinner.
So it was that she was sitting alone in a tavern one evening when a young male human approached her table. Before she could object, he slid into a human-sized seat opposite her snippen-sized perch.
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“It’s Taliana, isn’t it?” he said, touching his cap in welcome.
“Yes,” Taliana said without thinking. Sloppy. Classic fresh-eared apprentice mistake: don’t reveal your name to sketchy strangers in taverns.
“The name’s Herold,” the young man said, touching his cap again. “I, ah . . . heard you’re the apprentice for that aquamancer on Renner Street, right? Ilyan the Estimable?”
Taliana narrowed her eyes. “Who told you I worked for Ilyan?”
The human paused, then cleared his throat. “Your cousin.”
“Nice try,” Taliana snapped. “Twigly would have chopped your ears off before telling you anything.”
He shrugged. “Your other cousin.”
Split infinitives! He had outflanked her. She had too many cousins.
“What do you want?” Taliana said between bites. She’d have left then and there, except she’d paid good money for this potato salad. (And it was delicious.)
The human swallowed, his fingers rapping the table. “I, uh, happen to have noticed . . . well, . . . I know your family lost their home last week, and . . .”
Taliana shoved a bite of celery into her mouth. “. . . and?”
“Well . . .” the human straightened. “I know a patron who would be quite willing to fund a new burrow for your family.”
“I assume there’s a condition?”
“A minor one. He has a small problem that you’re uniquely suited to help with. He’s an aquamancer, new to the trade, new to the city. He’s heard your master is one of the finest aquamancers around, and is wondering if you’d be willing to give him some . . . pointers . . . on how to approximate Ilyan’s masterful results.”
Coordinating conjunctions! Why did this potato salad have to be so tasty?
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“I’m sorry,” said Taliana, trying to harness some of her cousin’s cheeky bravado, “but I’m afraid I’m bound by a nondisclosure contract. I can’t discuss my master’s work.”
The human dropped a small, heavy bag on the table with a clink. “Besides funding a new burrow, my client is also willing to pay you for your time. Generously.”
Taliana hefted the bag. Easily a hundred shekels. A whole month’s worth of pay.
She slide it back across the table. “No deal.”
The human leaned forward. “There’s more where that came from. A hundred shekels now. Another hundred later.”
Taliana shoved the last bite of potato salad into her mouth and stood up. “Even if I did know the old man’s secret—which I don’t, and probably never will—I’d never settle for a pathetic sum like two hundred shekels.”
“Three hundred,” said the human.
Taliana strode away, ignoring the man’s escalating bids. “Four hundred! Five!”
That man, Taliana thought, is hopeless at both bribery and haggling.
“Tell your ‘client’ to invest his money in something more practical,” Taliana called over her shoulder. “Maybe a triple-beam balance from Larrisa.”