GREEN-VEST GUY AND THE ONE-ARMED KORRIK

“Okay, question,” Taliana said one day.

“I’m not telling you my secret,” Ilyan said.

“I wasn’t going to ask that!” Taliana said. I was trying to be more discrete, she added mentally. “Green-Vest Guy. What’s his deal?”

“Who?”

“Every couple weeks, you get a visit from a tall, well-dressed man in a green vest. You go over ledgers with him, talk in whispers.”

“Confidential, I’m afraid,” Ilyan said. “And no—this secret is not THE secret.”

“Second question,” Taliana said. “The one-armed korrik. All our other suppliers just drop their crates off at the counter. But he gets to take his into the back, where, conveniently, he can unpack his wares without any customers seeing what’s inside.”

“He’s an old friend,” said Ilyan. “He ships some high-priced, specialty ingredients out of the Emerald Lake region. Gives me a slight discount in exchange for a good chat.”

“I see,” said Taliana, filing the information away. She had come to her own conclusions. She’d noticed that each time the one-armed korrik came by, several empty bottles of rosewood powder were replaced with full ones. This despite Ilyan never using the ingredient in a single recipe.

As far as Taliana knew, anyway.

*****

A FAVOR

“Twigly,” Taliana said one night, “I have a favor to ask.”

“A favor?” her cousin said, looking up from a length of twine strung between her fingers. “Hold on. I’m almost at snippen’s cradle.”

“Do you know how to spy on people?” Taliana asked.

“Sure!” Twigly said. “Just finished an apprenticeship for a noblewoman, spying on her daughter at social dances.”

That was . . . horrifying, but Taliana had more important things to think about. “You have anything else you’re up to?”

“I was thinking of stopping by the bear trainers tomorrow, see if they could use an assistant . . . yeah, probably a bad idea. My calendar’s free. What do you need?”

“There’s three people I want you to watch out for,” Taliana said. She described the young pyromancer, the green-vest guy, and the one-armed korrik. “If you spot them, follow them around. See what they’re up to. Who they visit. That type of thing. I’ll pay you out of my salary.”

“You can count on me!” Twigly said, attempting a salute with her hands still entwined, resulting in her ears getting entangled in the loops of yarn.

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“This better go better than the noodle incident,” Taliana warned. “I still haven’t regained all my tail hair.”

“That was an accident!”

“EXACTLY.”

*****

PRICES AND PROFITS

Something had been bothering Taliana ever since she had started selling for Ilyan. His prices. They were high. Not exorbitantly high, but higher than any other aquamancer in the capital.

One day, while scrubbing the tables of the mixery, she cleared her throat. “Master?” she said. “I have a question, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll have the question whether I mind or not, so you may as well ask it,” said Ilyan.

“You know Bartamew? The aquamancer down the street?”

“Hmm.”

“He sells his strength tincture for only three and a half shekels,” Taliana said.

“Hmmmmm.” said Ilyan, not looking up from where he was sorting seeds.

“I had a customer complain yesterday that charging seven shekels was unfair,” Taliana continued.

“H-hmm,” Ilyan hummed.

“Double the price.”

“Hm.”

They worked in silence for a minute.

“So . . .” Taliana said.

“You think we should lower our price,” said Ilyan.

“I think it would sell more, if we did.”

Ilyan paused, peering over his spectacles. “And what do you think we should lower it to?”

Taliana moved to the next table. “Maybe four shekels,” she finally said. “Four and a half.”

Ilyan didn’t respond immediately.

“Pricing,” he finally said. “A foundational business principle. Set it too high, and no one buys. Set it too low, and you can’t meet your costs.”

“Yet we have to compete with the other aquamancers,” Taliana said.

“You’ve seen the other shops,” said Ilyan. “They proudly post their prices. ‘Strength potion: three and a half shekels. Ambrosia of agility: two shekels. Sleep aroma: one and a quarter shekels.’ They each compete for the lowest price. Do I do that?”

“No,” Taliana said. Ilyan’s prices were nearly always several shekels higher than the going rate.

“How many strength potions have you sold this last week?”

Taliana had tallied the ledger just that morning. “Six.”

“I happen to know that last year, our friend Bartemew averaged twelve per week,” said Ilyan. “Then Nachimans undercut his price, and Bartamew’s sales plummeted. So he cut his prices even lower than Nachimans’, and now he’s back to selling a dozen a week.”

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“We could go even lower than him,” said Taliana. “I worked out the math this morning. Our ingredients only come to two and a half shekels per potion.”

“So we cut our price to three shekels,” Ilyan said. “Customers flock to us. We sell maybe twenty potions a week. At half a shekel of profit per potion, that’s ten shekels of profit per week. But remember: you’d have to triple the number of batches you make. Subtracting the additional labor costs, I profit maybe eight shekels per week.

“Compare that to where we’re at now. For the last decade, I have consistently sold six or seven strength potions a week, every week, at seven shekels per potion. Once we subtract your labor, that’s around twenty-five shekels of profit—triple what it would be at the lower price.”

“But why do people still buy from you, when you are double the price?”

“Because my potions work,” Ilyan said. “Does Bartemew have the money to invest in a triple-beam balance? No, he does not. So he gets the ratios slightly off. Can he afford to hire the best apprentices? No, he cannot. So the recipes are followed sloppily. And, of course, does he have a little extra secret—an expensive one, I might add?” Ilyan winked at her. “No. My customers pay a higher price, yes, but they get much more value. So you tell me. Should I lower my price?”

“I guess not,” Taliana said.

She finished scrubbing the tables in silence, pondering what he’d let slip about his secret. An expensive one. It was the first real clue he’d given her in five months.