# Chapter 1: The Day Job

The thing about working in an herbal supply shop was that everything smelled like potential. Potential remedies, potential poisons, potential meals if you were desperate enough and knew which shelf to avoid. I knew which shelf to avoid. I also knew which shelves were overpriced, which products were mislabeled — not fraudulently, just lazily — and which of the enchanted items in the back cases had structural integrity roughly equivalent to a paper bridge in a rainstorm.

That last part was harder to explain, so I didn't.

Gavren's Botanical & Sundry opened at seventh bell, which meant I arrived on the sixth bell to take inventory, sweep the floor, and convince myself that today would be the day I stopped counting how many meals I could stretch from what was left in my coin purse. It was not that day. It was never that day. I had eleven coppers and a half-silver that I suspected was shaved, which put me at roughly two meals if I was creative and one if I was honest. Sadly, I was usually honest about money. It was one of my more expensive habits.

The inventory was simple enough. Front room: dried herbs, tinctures, salves, poultices, and the usual assortment of things people bought when they were sick, thought they were sick, or wanted to make someone else sick but lacked the imagination to do it properly. Feverwort moved fastest — there was always a cough going around the docks — followed by maiden's lace, which moved for reasons I pretended not to notice, and stone-root powder, which was useful for joint pain and absolutely useless for the twelve other things the broadsheets claimed it cured.

The back room was far more interesting to me. Licensed magical components, locked behind warded glass and requiring my signature on a ledger for every sale. Runestones — mostly calibration-grade, nothing powerful. Binding salts. Essence vials in six standard concentrations. A rack of pre-inscribed focusing rods that were, technically, the most valuable things in the shop and, practically, about as exciting as a drawer full of hammers. Tools. Useful, necessary, and profoundly dull to anyone who didn't know what they were for.

I knew what they were for, or rather, what you could do with them if you were intelligent. That was part of the problem.

I was re-shelving a crate of dried silkweed when I noticed the ward-jar on the third shelf was doing it again.

(*Third ring off-axis. Resonance gap between second and third anchors. Moisture seepage through the preservation field at roughly the speed of patience. Moonpetal chalk by month's end. Artificer blames storage. Gavren eats the cost. Customer gets expensive dust.*)

I moved the jar to a higher shelf where the air was drier. It wouldn't fix the flaw — not my job — but it would slow the decay enough that the product would sell before it mattered.

My brain always did this. I'd started calling it "the noise" when I was about fourteen, because that was the year I realized other people didn't hear it. Not noise exactly — more like a river. Constant, running underneath everything, picking apart every piece of magic I passed within ten feet of. You forget it's unusual after a while. You forget it's even there, the way people who live beside water stop hearing the current. Then someone asks why you're staring at a ward-jar instead of shelving silkweed, and you remember: oh, right. Not everyone's head does this.

The front door rattled at precisely seventh bell. Gavren Holst was a man of mechanical punctuality and absolutely nothing else. He was neither cruel nor kind, tall nor short, generous nor miserly. He occupied the exact center of every human spectrum and seemed committed to staying there. In three years of employment, I had learned two things about him: he opened on time, and he disliked when I rearranged his shelves.

I rearranged his shelves constantly. The man organized by alphabetical name rather than by function, which meant the feverwort was next to the foxglove and two aisles away from the fire-throat remedy it was most commonly purchased alongside. Customers wandered. Wandering customers asked questions. I disliked questions. Reorganizing the shelves reduced questions by roughly forty percent, which I considered well worth the biweekly lecture about "established systems."

Gavren set his coat on the hook by the door, surveyed the front room with the expression of a man checking if wax was applied correctly to furniture, and noticed the silkweed had been moved from the second shelf to the fourth. "Varrant, we've discussed this."

"The silkweed was next to the sweetbalm. Cross-contamination risk," I said.

"They're in sealed containers," he retorted.

"Sealed containers that Mrs. Dallery opens to sniff before buying. Every time. She opened the sweetbalm last Thursday, then opened the silkweed, and I spent ten minutes picking sweetbalm fibers out of the silkweed with tweezers."

He considered this. Gavren always considered things. It was his primary form of exercise.

"Fine. But the moonpetal stays where it—"

"Moved the moonpetal too," I interrupted. I had tired of this conversation already.

His mouth did the thing where it wanted to object but couldn't find a factual foothold. This was the thing about Gavren. Irritating, but honest enough to lose an argument when he didn't have the evidence.

"One of these days," he said, hanging his apron with the careful precision of a man who'd hung the same apron on the same hook eleven thousand times, "you'll rearrange something and I won't notice for a week, and that's when I'll know you've gotten too comfortable."

"I assure you," I said, "comfort is not a risk."

He looked at me — not unkindly, but with the vaguely puzzled expression of someone who'd hired a tool that turned out to be slightly more complicated than advertised. Then he unlocked the front door and flipped the sign.

Seventh bell. Open for business.

I leaned against the counter —

(*Eleven coppers. Shaved half-silver, probably not worth a full half. Two meals if creative, one if honest. Same as this morning. Same as yesterday. The arithmetic hadn't changed. The habit was load-bearing.*)

— and waited for the day to start being something other than this.

* * *

The morning rush, such as it was, arrived in the predictable sequence of human need.

First through the door: a dockworker with a bruised shoulder and the squint of a man who'd been told by his wife to see a healer and had decided, independently, that a jar of something from a shelf would be cheaper and involve fewer questions about how he'd been injured.

(*Bruised shoulder, left side. Carried something heavy and twisted. Not the first time — the calluses said dock work, the squint said wife sent him. Wedding band, copper, worn thin. Arnica salve, second shelf. In and out.*)

He was correct on both counts. I pointed him toward the arnica salve, he grunted in a way that passed for gratitude among people who carried things for a living, and he was gone in under two minutes. Efficient. The best kind of customer — like good plumbing, you didn't have to think about it.

Second: a young woman with ink-stained fingers and the faintly manic energy of someone three days into an academic deadline. She wanted ginkgo extract and lion's mane tincture — cognitive enhancers, both of them, and both about as effective as hoping very hard if you weren't already sleeping and eating properly, which she clearly wasn't. I sold them to her without comment. My job was to stock shelves and process transactions, not to practice medicine on people who hadn't asked. Besides, the placebo effect was the most reliable magic I'd ever encountered, and it didn't even require a license.

Third was Mrs. Dallery, right on schedule, who came in every Godsday morning to buy something she didn't need and complain about something she couldn't change. Today it was the weather, the price of candles, and her neighbor's cat, in that order. I made the appropriate sounds at the appropriate intervals — a skill I'd developed not out of social grace but out of the discovery that the right grunt at the right moment could reduce a Mrs. Dallery visit from twenty minutes to eleven. She bought dried chamomile, which she could have grown in her own garden for free, and left satisfied that someone had listened to her. I had not listened to her. But the sounds had been convincing, and in my experience, that was all anyone actually wanted — not to be heard, but to believe they had been.

I was restocking the fire-throat shelf — it was autumn, and autumn meant sore throats, and sore throats meant I'd be restocking this shelf every two hours until spring — when the fourth customer came in and made things briefly interesting.

He was Guild. Not my guild — not yet my guild, I corrected myself, with the involuntary optimism of someone who'd been correcting that thought for six weeks — but Merchant's Guild, by the cut of his coat and the way he looked at price tags, — less "how much does this cost" and more "how much *should* this cost and why are you wrong." He browsed the back cases with the careful nonchalance of someone who wanted to appear knowledgeable, picked up a calibration-grade runestone, turned it over twice, and brought it to the counter.

"This is second-tier stock," he said. Not a question.

"Calibration grade," I confirmed. "As labeled."

"The shop on Fenwick Street sells first-tier for only two silvers more."

"The shop on Fenwick Street sells re-graded seconds with polished casings and a markup for confidence. But you're welcome to shop there." 

He stared at me. I stared back. This was, in my experience, the part of the conversation where people decided whether I was being rude or honest, and then decided which one they preferred. Merchants usually preferred honest, because it suggested I might be useful. Regular people usually preferred rude, because it gave them permission to be offended, a social currency I'd never understood the exchange rate for.

He bought the runestone. He also bought a set of binding salts and a focusing rod, and he did it with the quiet efficiency of a man who'd gotten the answer he actually came for, which wasn't about the runestone at all. He'd been testing whether I knew my stock. I did. Whatever arithmetic his Merchant's Guild training had been running had apparently resolved in my favor, because he left a copper tip on the counter. Unusual enough to note.

I put the copper with my eleven and recalculated. Three meals if I was creative. Two and a half if I was honest.

The morning ground on. Two more customers — a healer's apprentice buying standard supplies with a list in someone else's handwriting, and an elderly man who wanted to know if we carried essence of nightbloom, which we didn't, because essence of nightbloom didn't exist and never had. I explained this. He argued. I showed him the licensing registry, which listed every approved magical component in Drenwick. He argued with the registry. I admired his commitment, if not his relationship with reality, and eventually sold him lavender oil, which would accomplish whatever he'd convinced himself nightbloom would accomplish, because what he actually needed was to sleep better, and I'd known that since he walked in.

Between customers, I thought about the Guild.

Not Merchant's. Not Healer's. Not the eleven other registered guilds that operated out of Drenwick's guild quarter with their brass plaques and their waiting lists and their quarterly socials that I imagined involved a great deal of standing in rooms making the sounds that convinced people you were listening.

The Guild of Necessary Services. My application had been submitted six weeks ago. The acknowledgment letter — one line, no signature, delivered by a courier who hadn't waited for a reply — had said only: *Under review. Do not inquire.*

So I hadn't inquired. I had, instead, stocked shelves, swept floors, counted coppers, and thought about it constantly, which was technically different from inquiring the way staring at a locked door was technically different from knocking.

The Guild was my way out. Not just out of the shop — out of the math. The endless, grinding arithmetic of a life that cost more than it paid. Twelve coppers wouldn't become a house. Guild work might. Eventually. If they took me. If I was what they needed.

I was what they needed. I was almost certain of this in the way I was almost certain of things I couldn't prove, which was frequently and usually correctly. But "almost" had a weight to it when you were counting meals, and six weeks was a long time to carry that weight without setting it down.

The door chime rang again. I assembled my customer-management expression — neutral, competent, approachable enough to not alarm but not so approachable as to invite conversation — and looked up.

The expression didn't hold.

* * *

She wasn't beautiful in the way that word usually gets deployed — not the kind of beauty that announces itself from across a room and waits for you to catch up. It was worse than that. It arrived quietly, settled into the details, and refused to leave. The angle of her jaw. The way she moved through the shop like she'd already mapped it and found it adequate. Hair the color of gold, pulled back in a way that suggested she'd done it once, efficiently, and hadn't thought about it since.

I noticed all of this in approximately two seconds, which was unusual. I noticed most people the way you notice furniture — present, functional, worth cataloguing for navigation purposes and then forgetting. I did not forget her. This was immediately inconvenient.

My process — the automatic, near-involuntary cold read I ran on every person who walked through a door — engaged as usual.

(*Posture: confident, not performed. Clothing: practical, well-maintained, not expensive. Hands: no rings, short nails, callus on right index finger — writing or detailed manual work. Eyes: scanning, not browsing. Already knows what she's here for. Cataloguing the rest while she locates it.*)

All of this was normal. Data. Behavioral surface I could read on anyone in a room and use to predict their next three decisions with reasonable accuracy.

What wasn't normal was the gap.

Normally, the surface data connected to something underneath — motivations, insecurities, the architecture of want and fear that made humans predictable in the ways that mattered. You read the posture, and it told you about the confidence, and the confidence told you about the need, and the need told you what they'd do next. Layers. I was good at layers.

She didn't have layers. Or rather — she had them, but they weren't hidden. The surface and the substance were the same thing. She stood the way she stood because that was how she stood, not because she was projecting anything about how she wanted to be perceived. She scanned the shelves because she was looking for something, not because she wanted to appear knowledgeable or casual or any of the other performances people ran without knowing they were running them.

There was no subtext. My entire reading apparatus, the thing that made people useful and predictable and slightly boring, hit a wall of pure directness and came back empty-handed.

I found this annoying. I also found it fascinating, which was worse, because fascination was a more expensive emotion than annoyance and I couldn't afford either.

She walked past the front displays without slowing — herbs, tinctures, salves, all dismissed in a glance — and went straight for the back cases. The licensed section. She knew the shop had one, which meant she'd either been here before or done research, and either option suggested a specificity of purpose that most customers didn't bother with.

I followed at a professional distance. "Can I help you find something?"

She didn't look up. "Binding salts. Refined, not bulk. And I need to see your silverthorn stock."

"The binding salts are in the second case, top shelf. Silverthorn is seasonal — we've got dried stems and powdered root, but not fresh."

"Powdered root. What's the harvest date?"

I checked the label. "Fourteenth of Last Harvest. Drenwick supplier, guild-certified."

"That's acceptable." She said this the way someone else might say "fine" or "sure" — not dismissive, just precise. A fact about the silverthorn's acceptability, delivered without social padding.

I unlocked the case and set the silverthorn on the counter. She picked it up, opened the container, and examined the contents with an attention to detail that I recognized because it was the same attention I gave to things that actually interested me. She wasn't checking the quantity or the color. She was assessing the granularity of the powder — how finely it had been milled, whether the particles were consistent.

"This was processed with a standard mill," she said. "Not hand-ground."

"Correct. Hand-ground silverthorn runs about four times the price and has to be special-ordered," I said plainly.

"I know what it costs, it's too much. This will work." She set it down and moved to the binding salts. There were six containers, all from the same supplier, all theoretically identical. She opened three of them, examined each one, and selected the second.

"That one's the same as the others," I said, because I was curious, not because I was arguing.

"No. This one has a slightly higher crystal density. The granules are more uniform. The first container had two clumps, which means it was exposed to moisture at some point and re-dried. The third has a faint discoloration along the bottom layer — probably fine, but I don't use 'probably fine' as a standard."

She looked back at me with the patient expression of someone who had just stated something obvious and was waiting for the world to catch up.

"You're right," I said. "About all of it."

"I know."

Not arrogance — flat certainty, the verbal equivalent of "the sky is up." She had looked at the binding salts, seen what was there, and reported it. The possibility that she might be wrong did not appear to have occurred to her, and based on the evidence, it shouldn't have.

I realized I was smiling. This was unusual enough that I stopped, examined the impulse, found it genuine, and allowed it to resume in a more controlled fashion.

"Most customers just grab the nearest container," I said.

"Most customers are wrong about things they don't bother to check. I'm not most customers," she said plainly.

"No," I agreed. "That... you aren't."

She looked at me for a moment — really looked, with the full weight of whatever processing system she ran behind those eyes — and her focus recalibrated. Not dramatically. Not a spark or a jolt or any of the words people used in stories I didn't read. She'd been assessing the shop. Now she was assessing me. I had apparently moved categories.

"You know your stock well," she said. "Better than most shop clerks."

"I'm not most shop clerks." I smiled back, again without realizing it until it was too late.

The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. An acknowledgment. "Clearly."

I rang up the binding salts and the silverthorn, wrote the transaction in the ledger, and calculated her total. Our hands brushed when I passed her the package. This was not significant. Hands brush during transactions constantly. It is a function of geometry and proximity and means nothing.

I noticed it anyway.

(*Warmth. Brief. She didn't pull away faster than necessary. Didn't linger either — no data there. But the absence of avoidance. The neutral duration. Was that a signal or the lack of one? Baseline: most people retract. She didn't. Deviation from norm or absence of norm? Insufficient sample size. One interaction. One touch. Meaningless. Noted anyway. Filed under —*)

*Stop it,* I told myself. I was reading subtext into a woman who didn't have subtext. If she hadn't pulled away, it was because there was no reason to pull away, and assigning meaning to the absence of avoidance was exactly the pattern-matching error I spent my life not making.

"Thank you," she said. She picked up her purchase, turned toward the door, and then paused. "You rearranged the shelves."

"Excuse me?"

"The front displays. They're organized by function, not alphabetically. The labels are in the owner's handwriting but the arrangement isn't his logic. It's yours."

Less than five minutes in the shop and she had read the shelving system, identified two different organizational minds behind it, and correctly attributed the revision to someone other than the owner. From the *labels.*

"How did you—"

"The groupings make sense." she answered before I could finish the sentence. "His labels don't match the groupings. Either he's bad at organizing, which seems unlikely given that everything else in this shop is meticulous, or someone else moved things into a better system and he hasn't relabeled yet. You're the only employee I've seen. Simple deduction."

"Simple," I repeated.

"Yes." She said this without irony. Then she left.

The door closed behind her. The chime rang once and settled. The shop was exactly as it had been before she'd walked in — same shelves, same stock, same eleven coppers and a shaved half-silver and a tipped copper waiting to become meals.

Nothing had changed. I was aware that this was technically true and functionally a lie.

I realized I hadn't asked her name. This was, by any reasonable metric, a failure of basic information gathering, and I had no one to blame but the part of my brain that had apparently decided to stop functioning the moment she'd said "simple deduction."

* * *

The rest of the afternoon was unremarkable, which I resented. After a certain caliber of interesting, the ordinary felt like a personal insult — every transaction a reminder that the day had peaked at roughly half past ten and was now committed to a slow decline toward closing bell.

I sold feverwort to two more dockworkers, explained to a young mother that no, we did not carry teething remedies with "just a touch of calming enchantment" because enchanted ingestibles for children required a Class Three healer's prescription and I was not going to prison over someone's molar, and spent twenty minutes helping Gavren reconcile the ledger because he'd transposed two figures in yesterday's binding salt inventory and couldn't find the discrepancy. I found it in under a minute. He thanked me with his usual nod — gratitude and mild irritation in equal measure, as though my competence was both useful and vaguely accusatory.

Sixth bell. Gavren flipped the sign, locked the front door, and began his closing ritual, which involved wiping down surfaces that were already clean in a sequence that had not varied once in the three years I'd known him. I swept the floor, locked the back cases, and signed the ledger.

"Varrant."

I looked up. Gavren was standing by the door with his coat on, which was normal, and an expression that suggested he was about to say something human, which was not.

"You're good at this job," he said. "I want you to know I'm aware of that."

I waited. There was a "but" in his posture.

"But you're not going to be here much longer. I can tell. I've had employees before who were passing through, and you've been passing through since the day I hired you." He put his hat on, adjusted it with the mechanical precision of a man who'd adjusted the same hat eleven thousand times. "When you go, give me two weeks. That's all I ask."

"I will," I said, and meant it.

He nodded, satisfied, and left. The door closed. I stood alone in the shop that smelled like potential — remedies, poisons, meals — and thought that Gavren Holst was more perceptive than I gave him credit for — a failure of observation on my part that I didn't enjoy acknowledging.

I locked up and stepped into the evening.

* * *

Drenwick at dusk was tolerable. The light did something to the river that made it look like it belonged in a better city, and the noise from the docks softened into a background hum that my brain could file away without processing. The air had turned — autumn settling in properly now, carrying the dockside cocktail of tar and salt and fish oil that had long since stopped registering as unpleasant and simply become the smell of going home. A barge was making its last run upriver, the bargeman's lantern already lit against the early dark.

I walked the route I always walked — south along the quay, past the chandler's and the net-mender's, through the gap in the old customs wall —

(*Two bricks missing. Load-bearing? No — decorative course. Gap hadn't widened in the three years I'd been using it. Mortar on the adjacent bricks still sound. Someone had removed them deliberately, not knocked them out. Interesting. Irrelevant. Filed.*)

— where no one had bothered to repair the gap because the only thing on the other side was scrub grass and a path that led to the part of the waterfront where rent was cheap enough that someone like me could afford to exist.

My shack sat on a quarter-acre lot between the river and the old mill road, rented from a landlord I'd never met and whose agent collected on the first of every month with the cheerful indifference of a man who knew his tenants had nowhere cheaper to go. It had a view of the water if you stood on the eastern edge and a view of the mill's backside if you stood anywhere else.

The shack itself was one room, which was generous if you considered it a sleeping space and depressing if you considered it a home. I did not consider it a home. A home was what I was going to build someday — somewhere with land that was actually mine, where the morning light came through clean and gold. I had drawings. I had plans. I had a notebook full of measurements and material estimates and a floor layout that I'd revised nine times because the proportions of the workshop kept changing as I learned more about what I'd need.

The workshop was the thing. Not the house — houses were shelter, and shelter was solvable. The workshop was where the actual work would happen. The work I was meant to be doing, if I could ever get far enough past the arithmetic of survival to start.

I spread the drawings on the table, which I did most evenings, not because I needed to review them but because looking at them was the closest thing I had to faith. Five rooms. A workshop with ventilation and proper warding anchors built into the foundation. A main room large enough to not feel like a shack. A bedroom. A kitchen — embarrassingly absent until revision four, because apparently I'd been planning to sustain myself on determination and ambient river moisture. And a bathroom, added in revision six. Why it took me six revisions to understand that a person needs a place to bathe and relieve themselves, I'll never know, but it's there now.

Twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver.

The house needed approximately eight hundred silvers in materials alone.

(*Eight hundred for materials. Sixty for permits. Two hundred minimum for warding work if done by a licensed artificer, one-forty if I sourced the anchors myself and contracted just the inscription. Labor: three hundred if hired, less if I did the framing. Total: thirteen hundred, give or take. Current savings: twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver. Time to break ground at current rate of accumulation: forty years. Margin of error: irrelevant when the number starts with forty.*)

At my current rate of savings — not a rate so much as a theoretical concept, like perpetual motion or honest politics — I would be able to break ground in roughly forty years, give or take the occasional windfall or catastrophe.

The Guild changed that math. Guild work paid in silvers, not coppers. Real cases, real fees, real clients who needed problems solved that couldn't be solved through ordinary channels. If they accepted me. If the six weeks of silence meant consideration and not rejection. If the single-line letter that said *Under review. Do not inquire* was a process and not a polite dismissal.

I stared at the drawings and did not think about the Guild.

I thought about her instead, which was not an improvement.

She'd read the shelving system. She'd identified the binding salt defect by crystal density. She'd selected silverthorn powder based on granularity consistency and dismissed a contaminated container that I — I, who noticed things for a living and sometimes against my will — had not flagged. She had walked into my shop, performed a more rigorous quality assessment than most licensed apothecaries would bother with, and then left without once performing the social rituals that humans used to sand down the edges of interaction.

No small talk. No hedging. No "I think maybe possibly this one might be slightly better?" She'd looked, seen, and stated. Like facts were a language she spoke natively and everything else was a second tongue she'd never bothered to learn.

I found this — what? Attractive was the obvious word. Insufficient, too. I'd been attracted to people before, noted it, filed it, and moved on with the pragmatic indifference of someone who couldn't afford dinner for one, let alone two.

This was different. This had edges I couldn't map. She'd disrupted something in the machinery — the cold read, the automatic sorting, the process by which I turned people into data and moved on. She hadn't resisted it. She hadn't even known it was happening. She'd simply been exactly what she was, with nothing hidden, and the absence of the thing I was looking for had become more interesting than the thing itself.

I should ask her out. The thought arrived with the casual confidence of an idea that hadn't checked the budget. I should find out her name, construct a plausible reason to continue the conversation, and suggest — what? Coffee? A walk? An evening of comparing our respective approaches to quality assessment in commercial goods? That last one would probably work for her — either a very good sign or evidence that I'd lost perspective entirely.

I wouldn't ask her out. The math was clear, even if the rest wasn't. I was a shelf-stocker with a shack and a dream drawn on paper. She was — whatever she was. Precise. Certain. The kind of person who walked into rooms already knowing what she wanted and walked out having gotten it. People like that didn't end up with people like me. That wasn't self-pity. It was arithmetic.

I put the drawings away, ate my one honest meal — bread, hard cheese, an apple that was optimistic about its own freshness — and lay on the cot listening to the river do what it did every night — exist loudly and without consideration for people trying to sleep.

The plans stayed on the table. Nine revisions and counting.

I thought about crystal density, and golden hair, and the particular way she'd said *simple deduction* without irony, and I fell asleep annoyed at a woman whose name I didn't know for reasons I couldn't quantify, which was — if I was being honest, and I was usually honest — not a bad way to end a day that had otherwise been entirely about counting coppers.

Just before sleep took, I caught the faintest trace of something near the door — not from inside the shack, from outside. A magical residue, old and faded, the kind left by someone carrying a warded object. It had been there a while, maybe hours, maybe longer. Not a threat. Not quite nothing, either. I filed it in the place where things went when I was too tired to care but too wired to fully ignore, and let the river noise carry me under.
