“I, ah, mean, in general, as a sort of wide-ranging assessment of my abilities,” Lief said awkwardly. “Obviously, I bought most of it. Look, here’s some proper clothes, so he doesn’t look like a wizard—”

“Oh, of course, we can’t have him looking like a wizard,” Penthos snapped with what even Nth recognized as sarcasm. “How terrible that would be!”

Lief’s expression shifted to “aggrieved.” “Seriously, he looks like a freak to start with. Have him look like a freak wizard and we’ll have a mob after us with torches and pitchforks. Let him at least look like some everyday sort of freak.”

“I am not a freak.”

They froze, staring at Nth. He had not exactly decided to speak—in fact, had he been able to, he would have chosen to stay silent and live a few more moments being ignored, but something in him—the native spider or the transplated Man—had piped up.

Their expressions were shifting and hard to read, but at last Harathes spat out, “Shut up, freak,” and that was apparently the end of it.

Lief still looked a little unhappy, and his eyes strayed to Nth a couple of times. “Anyway, some decent clothes for the road, a nice leather cuirass so he at least looks fit to travel.”

“A knife,” Cyrene observed.

“Everyone has a knife,” Lief said defensively. “I thought you wanted him to blend in?”

“We’re not giving it a knife,” she told him.

The small Man spread his hands, a gesture with complex connotations. “Fine. Anyway. All of that ate all your money, so be very thankful I was able to find these in the gutter.”

He held something up. Round, dark discs of glass on a wire frame.

“They’ll hide those… eyes of his, and if he wears his hood, the little ones on his forehead’ll get covered too. Smoked glass spectacles. Amazing what people don’t realize they’ve dropped, eh?”

Dion was still looking at him unhappily, but he told her, “It’s for the quest, right? For the Light? I’m sure whoever, ah, lost these would have given them willingly to the cause if we’d only been able to ask, eh?”