“Twenty.”
“Seven.”
“Twenty.”
“Seven.”
“…nineteen.”
“Seven.”
The weary merchant ran a hand over his face and, with the other, stroked the dried-out parakeet hanging on the inside of his stall.
“I really can’t go a single blanc below fifteen déniers.”
It was not long after dawn at the port of Tremallan. The crews on the larger vessels had still not stirred, but a loose line of small fishing vessels could be seen trailing into dock with the day’s first catch. The thicket of stalls which sheltered under the southern walls of the great coastal city were still kept in twilit gloom under the shadow of the towering buildings.
“Seven is below fifteen, though.”
The young woman opposite him took her finger out of her mouth to speak, and plopped it back in when she was done. She was dressed like the Sisters of Frithuswith the Inexactable, in a neat black frock which reached down to her knees. Her hair was covered with a cloth – black on white – but only casually, such that a few locks escaped it on one side. Perhaps it was only the light, but they appeared more pink than blonde.
She was beguiling and innocent and wide-eyed, with irises of blue and dimples on either cheek. The stallkeeper tried to focus on her appearance so he could muster up enough warm feeling towards her to fuel an ingratiating smile.
“My lady. Let’s leave aside this unseemly counterpoint. I’ll sell the mirror to you for fifteen déniers – and throw in a pretty pin besides – on the condition that you will help spread word about my stall. I have just set it up this very morning, you see, and must set up a regular clientele.”
“Alright. I’m not too busy this morning. I’ll only pay seven for it though.”
“But I–! …young lady, I bought the thing for twelve! I would be selling it for half of what I paid for it!”
The young woman shrugged.
“I don’t really know anything about that. I just know I’ll only pay seven for it.”
“This isn’t even haggling! You need some basic sense of the value of the object. And then there has to be some give and take!”
“Alright. I’ll give you seven déniers and then take the mirror!”
He stroked so hard on the dried-out parakeet that he pulled it off its rope and stood there for a moment, staring down disbelievingly at it in his hand.
He turned his attention to the mousy girl who had been standing silently throughout their conversation. Though they were in fact near enough the same age, she seemed looked as if she had only seen half as many summers as her companion. Where the pink-haired girl was plump and flush with vitality in her form-fitting frock, she was scrawny and scared in the dusty grey canvas sheet which she wore as a makeshift dress, her bare and blistered feet just barely visible where its hem dragged along the floor.
“Young girl. Please talk some sense into your friend here. Surely you can see this is going nowhere.”
She mumbled something inaudible and hid behind the pink-haired girl.
“She also says you should sell it to me for seven blancs.”
“It’s not even déniers anymore! It’s seven blancs!”
A diminutive peep came out from somewhere behind the pink girl, and the small hands grasping at her frock gripped it all the tighter.
“…oh, may the buccas take you!” The stallkeeper threw his hands up and shooed them off. “Get out of my sight, before you ruin my luck for the day entirely!”
The marketplace was coming alive as the crowds slowly trickled in from the open gates of Tremallan. The two girls strolled through them. One of them was entirely at her ease. The other ducked away from anyone hawking their wares more loudly than the squawking seagulls overhead.
“B-Butcher?”
The pink-haired girl seemed to trip behind a yawning, beady-eyed foreign merchant, and yet when she rose back unsteadily to her feet, her knees were free of any grime, and she was flicking two silver coins between the fingers of her left hand.
“Yes, Winky?”
“What did that man mean when he said about ruining his luck for the day?”
“Oh – the stallkeepers around here think that if you don’t close the first sale of the day, you’ll be cursed with bad luck for the rest of it. It’s part of the reason some people come down here early.”
“I-is that the reason why you–”
“Ooh! They’ve got candied figs!”
Using one of her freshly purloined coins, Butcher bought five of the little fruits – all skewered on sturdy twigs so they could be licked at leisure. She offered one to Winky, who shook her head and looked down at her feet. Butcher shrugged and returned it to her right hand, where she twirled the other twigs like a juggler. She peppered her charge with questions as they ambled through the market.
“So. Where did Mikka find you?”
Winky’s gaze strayed down at her feet, and when she looked back up, she just barely caught sight of her companion skipping over a lizardman’s tail and disappearing behind him.
“…wait, Butcher! Wait for me! I… my… my… I was travelling with my parents from Mitjorn in a boat. My father was going to be a carpenter on the island of Bréhat. But my parents… got sick on the way. I worked onboard for a while but I wasn’t much use. And even though we had paid for the whole journey, the ship’s captain said I was just taking up space and dropped me off at the port here. I tried begging, but, well, anyway, I was just starting to look for somewhere to sleep when Mikka squatted down and started talking to me.”
Butcher didn’t seem to be paying any attention. But when the orphaned girl stopped speaking, she shoved a freshly baked bun into her hands.
“…thank you.”
Butcher’s mouth was full, her cheeks puffed out, and she held a meat pie between her teeth. Her face was flushed, and steam rose from the sides of her mouth as she blew her breath out. And so instead of talking, she nodded her head as a “you’re welcome”. Winky grinned a little at the sight, and followed along while nibbling at the bun. Eventually, Butcher finished the pie, and resumed her questions.
“So what’s it like being with the gang? Hideout too messy for you?”
“Oh, no, it’s fine.”
“What do you think of Tentpole, then?”
Winky blushed, and almost hesitated, before remembering that Butcher would be quite content to leave her behind if she stalled.
“He’s… he’s a great leader. He cares so much about all of you.”
“All of us.”
“All of… us. He’s so decisive and hard-working and–”
“Alright, alright – easy on the lovestruck dove impression. What about Mistress?”
Winky blushed, but Butcher couldn’t tell if it was because she had called her a lovestruck or mentioned Mistress.
“…I’ve never met anyone as elegant as her. She’s just a street-thief but… oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to… alright, I was going to say that, despite that, she’s the most dignified person I’ve ever met. I’ve never even used that word to describe anybody else before.”
“What about One-face, then?”
Winky’s face went from a bashful blush to an empty-eyed sneer of disgust in less than a second.
“Who? Him? Why would you even ask about him? Especially when I was thinking about Mistress. Such a waste. If you’d at least asked about the rats that scurry over my legs at night, I wouldn’t have been so bad, but him?”
“…ouch. I mean, it’s not like I think that much of him either, but still.”
Butcher got to work a little more in earnest then. Her manner grew more casual, her repartee with Winky more trivial, and the hidden folds of her seemingly simple flock more full by the minute. Every now and again, she would point out a particular passerby – sometimes imposing and sometimes unassuming – and warn Winky off even approaching them with a flash of her eyes.
The sun was just starting to dip down from its noon zenith, and the afternoon dropped into the muggy end of balmy. Winky was sitting by the docks, watching Butcher and a dozen sailors heave and shout around a little ring which had been hastily cobbled together on the quay to race hermit crabs. After one last round, Butcher drifted back towards Winky, taking a crab leg out of her mouth to let out a long yawn. Winky got up and brushed off her filthy cotton sheet.
“Did you pick any winners?”
“I might as well have picked my nose for all the good it did. Come on, Winky.”
As the wind drakelets roused themselves from their sunsoaking and circled above to hunt the seagulls in the port, Butcher stopped by a shipping depot at the border between the warehouses and the market stalls. She nodded to the gruff and bearded sailor keeping watch and, scaling the wooden crates, leapt up onto a tarp, letting the coins spill from her frock and pool into a divot in the sun-stiffened canvas.
While Winky awkwardly made her way up to join her, Butcher finished totting up the morning’s haul, stretched out with her hands behind her head, and let out a self-satisfied sigh. She addressed Winky with her eyes closed.
“You weren’t scared of Mikka when he came up to you like that?”
“I was.”
“But you followed him anyway?”
“He wasn’t like the other ones. He seemed more crazy than dangerous. But I suppose I must not really have cared too much, at that point.”
“And you’re happy enough staying with us now?”
The girl Mikka had named ‘Winky’ squinted her eyes. A firmness came over her unlined face.
“I can’t think of a much better place for me to have washed up. Can you?”
Butcher shrugged an agreement.
“I didn’t like you at first,” she mumbled sweetly, as if she were asking for a bedtime story from an indulgent father. “It felt like you wanted to tell us to shape up a bit – to stop playing around so much. But that you were holding yourself back. And not necessarily out of fear. But I like you better now.”
Seconds later, she was asleep. Winky watched her as her chest rose and fell, and as she let out little snorts, and dribbled down the side of her mouth. She was starting to understand why they called her Butcher.
The two of them stayed there like that for the next few hours, until the sun drooped down to the western horizon. Butcher led them off the tarp and strolled slowly through the emptying marketplace, stopping here and there for a few moments – as if taking careful note of everything she had seen and done that day. Winky jumped as she heard a shout of outrage behind her. A metal object sailed past her and fell at Butcher’s feet with a light cracking sound.
“There! Just take the blasted thing! Stick it in a ditch and call it Mary! I didn’t make a single sale today! Do you hear that, witchling?! Not a single sea-drenched sale!”
David Leon 