“Do these exceptional scrolls interest you, verea? They are rare. Outlander work. It was chance I was able to lay hands on them. You’ll find nothing else like them in all of Olossi.”

“Look how dirty and torn they are,” said Mai with a kind smile. “How sad that those who handled them treated them with such scorn. Here, now, what can you tell me of these prints?” She indicated a set of pictures leaning against the wall. “How I love butterflies! So colorful they are! But is this a practiced hand? Or apprentice work? Please advise me, ver.”

Distracted, he followed her to the ranks of prints on display. “It’s very good work, although you might find Hoko’s work more to your taste, she is a master artisan, the best in town. Here are Hoko’s festival prints special for the Year of the Red Goat, which I can offer at a markdown since we scarcely had a festival this year due to the terrible events. See the detail of this wharf scene! The festival banners, the ghost ribbons, the food stalls. Here, the incomparable Eridit, and there a talking line of children from the Lady’s temple dance the episode of the reunited lovers from the Tale of Change.”

“It’s very fine, but the colors here look a little smudged. Oh, I do like that one, but—”

She smiled brightly and spoke cheerfully, and wielded her “but”s like a trimming knife until the shopkeeper begged for mercy. “Your sweet tongue is as sharp as those swords carried by your soldiers, verea,” he said, laughing. “I accept defeat! What is it you want?”

“It seems a high price for prints for a festival now over, for a year that won’t come around again for—well—how can I even count that far? Many rounds of years, surely, before the Red Goat walks again.”

“I can’t lower my price, verea. My overhead. Surely you understand. But I could throw in something else. Is there something you have your eye on?”

She made a show of examining other prints, the brushes, the inkstones. He had an assistant bring tea. As she sipped, savoring the gingery taste, she entertained him with a long digression about needing to bind a new accounts book, as she must of necessity set up a household.

“So you and the outlanders are indeed staying, as it is rumored?”

“Is it spoken of?”

“Surely it is, verea. You must know every person in Olossi talks of little else. How could it be otherwise, since your bold attack saved us from ruin?”

She liked him, for his laugh and his praise of Anji and the soldiers, and because bargaining entertained him as much as it did her. Because he offered tea not just to her and Priya but also to Eliar and Tuvi and the four soldiers as they loitered under the eaves, waiting for her. “I’ll need two accounts books. I am sure you can bind them with good-quality paper, something that will hold up better than those poor scrolls, and provide the necessary scribal tools.”