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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 86, The Unexpected Past
🕑 Added 2022-03-14 15:48:35 +0000 UTC~~~~
Making regular trips to Liberfell was a new thing for Mizuki, and she was loving it. With the wardrobe, it was basically just down the road, assuming that they got their positioning more or less right and didn’t screw up the warp, and with the dagger, they could make a single trip back to Pucklechurch.
They weren’t the only ones getting the benefits of being closer, and Mizuki had heard some quite positive things from other people in Pucklechurch, especially those who made the trip on a regular basis. Mizuki couldn’t imagine walking to Liberfell on a regular basis, but some people did it, and the wardrobe was helping them out a lot. There was something she really enjoyed about that, making her town a better place by bringing in entads. Alfric had said that entads flowed toward the big cities, where there were richer buyers, and Mizuki really didn’t like that. It tied back in with their earlier conversation about money, and how money was boring. It didn’t seem fair that the cities got cooler things than a town like Pucklechurch. Maybe, through dungeoneering, they could change that … except that they would run out of local dungeons unless they got better travel. Everyone seemed to be talking about them leaving, as though it was inevitable.
“Do you want to leave Pucklechurch?” Mizuki asked as they walked away from the warp point.
“Didn’t we just?” asked Isra.
“No, I mean … later,” said Mizuki. “When we’re out of dungeons, or when we’re done with dungeons. Do you want to be in Pucklechurch for the rest of your life?”
“Not the rest of my life,” said Isra.
“Maybe that’s too long a time span to think about,” said Mizuki.
“It is,” nodded Isra. “I don’t want to spend too long in Pucklechurch. I feel like I’ve wasted too much of my life there.”
“You’re eighteen,” said Mizuki with a frown.
“And you’re only twenty-two,” said Isra.
“Did you hear Bethany back there?” asked Mizuki. “She said that she was late getting married, and I agree with her. There are a number of girls from our class who are on their second or even third children. And then there’s me, who has nothing on the horizon, no kind of life except this dungeon thing, which is good, but it’s going to take us away.”
“It will take time,” said Isra. “As things are now, we can easily get to a lot of different dungeons.”
“How long is that going to last?” asked Mizuki. “But the sad thing is, I really do think that I’d leave. I wouldn’t want to, but … yeah, I would do it. Probably. And then how long would we be dungeoneering for? And how is it possible to raise children when you’re going off to dungeons every third day?”
“I don’t know,” said Isra. It seemed like an almost silly thing to worry about. “You could ask Alfric’s mother?”
“I feel like that would give her the wrong impression,” said Mizuki with a little laugh. “‘Hah ha, Mrs. Overguard, how do you handle having a baby and doing dungeons, just curious, please reply back within the next nine months.”
“Nine months?” asked Isra.
“Well, not nine months,” said Mizuki. “It would be like a month or two before you knew, so seven or eight months.”
“Excuse me?” asked Isra.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Just … a joke about how if I asked her for child-rearing advice, she might think that I was pregnant.”
“And that’s how long it takes for a person?” asked Isra. “Nine months?”
Mizuki tried to contain herself, she really did. “How do you not know that?”
“People are opaque to me,” said Isra with a shrug. “I can tell you how long it takes for any other animal, but for humans,” she shrugged again. “Nine months seems long. Longer than even the biggest of the bears.”
“Well I’m pretty sure it’s accurate,” said Mizuki. “Or at least, that’s what people say.”
They had stopped outside Herson & Sons, the entad shop, and were carrying on this conversation. Before they went in.
“Were you and Alfric flirting earlier?” asked Isra.
“Oh boy,” said Mizuki. She immediately felt flustered. “Let’s go in, we can talk about it later.” She didn’t really want to talk about it later though.
“Isra!” said Rolaj when they came into the shop, which wasn’t what Mizuki was expecting. He had a smile for the both of them. “I was hoping I would get to see you in person again. I have something for you.” He reached down below the counter, moved some things to the side, and brought a large bottle up from below. “Behold!”
Isra stared at it, and there was a moment of silence.
“Er, this is it, right?” asked Rolaj. “It would be very awkward if it wasn’t.”
“This is it,” said Isra. She stepped forward and touched the rim of it. The mouth was relatively small, like a wine jug, and the glass was thick. Mizuki pegged it at being a gallon, maybe a bit less. The dirt inside looked more like silt, and there was a tiny tree in the center of it, so big that it wasn’t clear to Mizuki how a person would get it out.
It took Mizuki a moment to realize that Isra was crying, but once she realized, she rushed in and wrapped Isra in a hug. Isra just buried her face in Mizuki’s shoulder and let it out, and Mizuki murmured gentle nothings to her. This was how Mizuki’s mom had always handled things. It lasted what felt like a long time, and Rolaj silently disappeared, coming back later with two cups of hot tea and a handkerchief.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” mumbled Isra when she was finished.
“It’s okay,” said Mizuki. “It’s fine.” Her shoulder was tear-stained, but being able to help, if only in a small way, felt wonderful.
Isra turned to Rolaj with puffy red eyes. She took the handkerchief he offered, wiped her face and cleared the snot from her nose, and clenched it in her hand and looked down at the bottle again. She took a deep breath, cleared her throat, then looked up at him. “How much do you need for it?”
Rolaj shifted a bit, looking embarrassed. “It was stolen from you,” he said. “Legally, it would have to go through some channels, but if there were an investigation, it would probably end in your favor, and be returned to you at no cost. So, it’s yours to keep.”
Isra’s lip trembled, and Mizuki tried to get ready for another bout of tears, but Isra nodded and held it back. “Thank you,” she said with a strained voice.
“The entad seller wasn’t too happy to be losing it, but he saw the writing on the wall, and better to give it up rather than risk having it taken,” said Rolaj. “The thief’s name is mud now, if he’s still east of the Proten Lakes. Merchants talk.”
Isra nodded. Her eyes were still on the bottle.
“Well, this is a nice surprise,” said Mizuki.
Rolaj nodded. “Fast, by our standards. I was worried that it would take weeks to make its way to us, but there was a different shipment to Plenarch, and we piggybacked on it.”
Mizuki got the sense that this might not be the full truth, but that was just a feeling. She was really, really hoping that this wasn’t something that he had done to win her favor. All the niceness he’d displayed hadn’t convinced her that it was worth pushing ahead. Most of the problem was the distance between them, though the ease with which they’d gone to Liberfell made it seem like a little bit of a lie. Maybe the problem was also the letters: epistolary novels were in vogue at the moment, and it felt like Rolaj had possibly read one too many of them.
Isra straightened up. “I’d like to repay you and your father, along with the seller out east.”
“Oh,” said Rolaj. “Well as I said, it’s yours to keep.”
“Something to show my appreciation,” said Isra. “Something to mark us as friends.”
“Uh,” said Rolaj. “I really don’t need anything, and I don’t think my father does either.” He seemed almost ready to leave it at that, but Isra was doing her thing where she was staring him down, whether that was consciously or otherwise. “Something that doesn’t cost you much, I guess, like a meal or … or something.”
“Smoked meat?” asked Isra. “Honey?”
“Either of those would be much appreciated,” said Rolaj, relaxing.
“Both,” nodded Isra.
“Alright,” said Rolaj. He smiled. “Did you come in here because Alfric gave you some forewarning, or was there something you needed?”
“Just visiting our favorite entad shop!” said Mizuki. It was the wrong thing to say, the absolute wrong thing to say, and she regretted it immediately, but it was becoming clear to her that while she did need to break it off with Rolaj, she wouldn’t be doing it today.
“Have you pulled anything good?” asked Rolaj.
Mizuki was thankful that there was something else to talk about, and pulled her helm — the party’s helm, technically — out of her sack. “Flight,” she said. “Not appraised, but it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Almost eighteen miles an hour!” This was a wild approximation, but she had taken it out for a morning flight and done a little bit of math. Alfric had considered this dangerous, since it hadn’t been appraised, but she’d stayed low to the ground, low enough that she’d only have needed some clerical attention.
“Wow,” said Rolaj. “I think the best we have for flight right now is a flute, and it’s kind of garbage, only works when you’re blowing into it.”
Mizuki put the helmet on and hovered in place. One of the neat things about the weightlessness of the helmet, she’d discovered, was that if she was perfectly still, her hair would start to float around her too, as though she were underwater. The same went for her clothes though, and she dropped to the floor before the culottes began to rise too high.
“Very good,” said Rolaj. He had an appreciative smile for her, and it made her feel bad.
“You’re talked with Vertex, right?” asked Mizuki. “Do they have anything worth taking? A ‘trifle’, they said. Something they might have tried to pawn off here that was interesting but not that useful?”
“I’ve talked with them,” said Rolaj. “They have hundreds of entads sitting beside their tent at the moment. More than we can absorb, really, and more than they have the storage for, which is awkward. The mayor is none too happy about it, actually, feels like it’s an eyesore, but they apparently don’t have much in the way of money.” He shrugged.
“They’re dungeoneers, they should have money,” said Mizuki. “Enough to rent a house, surely.”
“Short notice,” said Isra.
“How long could it take to rent a house?” asked Mizuki. “Surely not more than a few days. It’s been a week.”
“Time and money,” said Rolaj with a shrug. “Aren’t your two groups … friends?”
“Kind of,” shrugged Mizuki. “Anyway, I’m not helping them to move, and I wouldn’t be able to find a place for them, so I guess they’re on their own.”
“I would help them if they asked,” said Isra.
“Really?” asked Mizuki. “I guess I would too, if Grig came up to me and said ‘hey, we really need some help’.”
“Because you’re a nice person,” said Isra with a nod.
“I’m okay,” said Mizuki.
“Do you have time later?” asked Rolaj. “While you’re in Liberfell? Like I said in my last letter, I was thinking that we might have a proper date.” There was a hopefulness to him that Mizuki hated, an almost painful eagerness.
“Um,” said Mizuki. “Look, you’re really sweet —”
“But you’re not interested?” asked Rolaj. He visibly deflated, and his cheeks went red.
“Um,” said Mizuki again. “It’s just … I don’t know.” She took a breath. “No.”
“It’s fine,” said Rolaj, though his voice was close to cracking. “Thank you for giving me a chance.”
“Sorry,” said Mizuki. She couldn’t help but cringe, and she knew that wasn’t the face she should be making.
It was incredibly awkward, painfully awkward, made more awkward by the fact that Isra was there. Mizuki hadn’t meant to do it, but it had been percolating in her head for some time, and then it had just slipped out. Every second that they spent in the store with him felt like agony, maybe because they were all avoiding the subject, and it took some time to get the bottle properly situated in Mizuki’s bag, taking up the space that the helmet had occupied.
When they were out of the store, Mizuki groaned. “Sorry, that was horrible.”
“It seemed amicable to me,” said Isra.
“I guess,” said Mizuki. “It could have gone a lot worse, I’ve had break ups that end with yelling and accusations and stuff like that. I hated it though, absolutely hated it. There’s a part of me that would have rather gotten married to him than have to go through that.”
“Mmm,” said Isra. “He seemed nice.” This was the kind of not-quite disagreement that Isra probably wouldn’t have offered after a breakup if she’d grown up with human friends.
“He was nice,” Mizuki admitted. “I think maybe if he’d lived in Pucklechurch, I might have been able to do it, but letter writing isn’t my strong suit, and going to Liberfell, even if it’s easy, felt like such a — a chore? Or something we’d need to schedule, anyway. I can’t just pop by his house and see if he’s in.”
“Mmm,” said Isra. She was, at least, not frowning like she normally did. “So you want someone close?”
“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Or maybe just … someone where we can be more spontaneous.”
“Someone we live with?” asked Isra.
From someone else, Mizuki might have taken this to be gentle ribbing, but Isra seemed quite serious. “I’m not interested in Alfric,” said Mizuki. “It’s just flirting.”
“But you don’t talk about it,” said Isra. “So how do you know?”
“Uh, he’s Alfric,” said Mizuki. “He’s a brick.” She saw that this wasn’t enough. “He’s easy and uncomplicated, if he were interested in more than flirting, I would know, and the fastest way I would know is that he’d just outright tell me.”
“And if you wanted more, you wouldn’t do the same?” asked Isra.
“It’s — I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Not usually my style. Though maybe it should be, so I don’t keep wasting the time of nice young boys like Rolaj.” That was real cause for reflection. Usually she would just flirt with someone, and if there was someone she was interested in, and the flirting was so overt it couldn’t be ignored, eventually he would make the first move.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” said Isra.
“Well, sure, nothing much invested, nothing much lost,” said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. “But thank you.” She reached over and gave Isra’s hand a squeeze. That felt like maybe a little much, but after having comforted Isra through a bout of crying in the middle of a store, it did seem like they should be closer.
They walked together, at least a little bit in their own heads, or so it seemed to Mizuki. Her thoughts kept going back to Rolaj and the absolutely terrible way she’d handled things. It would have been better to put it off, to just put up a front, and to not do it in front of Isra, not when Rolaj had just done what felt like a big favor.
The bastlekeeper’s place was on the edge of town, nice and big, with lots of room for all the animals. When Mizuki had first been there, she’d thought of it as something like a zoo, but after having been to the Dondrian zoo, she now realized that she hadn’t actually understood what a zoo was like. The bastlekeeper ran a pet shop, though many of the pets had some commercial function, and it wasn’t really much more than that.
When they went inside, Cate was there.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Awkward.”
“Hello again,” said Cate with a slight nod. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since they’d seen each other.
“Why are you here?” asked Isra.
“Business,” said Cate. “Perrin is the only bastlekeeper in three hexes and the best in six, or so he claims.”
“Seems like the kind of thing you’d need to ask the other bastlekeepers about,” said Mizuki. She looked at Perrin. The old man had looked at them expectantly when they’d entered, and given a wave of a hand, but was offering no support. “No offense.”
“None taken,” said Perrin. “Can I help you with something quick?”
“No,” said Isra. “We wanted to talk about taking the herb dragons from you.”
“Ah,” said Perrin, putting a hand to the back of his neck. “Well, how do the three of you know each other?”
“I know many things and many people,” said Cate with a wan smile. “But in this case, I came because they saw something in a dungeon that was of interest to the province, and will require some work on my end.”
“Cate and I go back,” Perrin explained. “I’ve known her what, twenty-odd years now?”
“They have been quite odd,” Cate nodded.
“What business do you have here?” asked Isra.
It was impossible not to read that as hostile, no matter how Mizuki tried to think about where Isra might be coming from. Whatever the bad feelings were, they’d been amped up by this coincidence. Maybe to Isra’s thinking, this wasn’t a coincidence, they were both here for the dragons. But that would be silly, wouldn’t it? Besides, Perrin didn’t own the dragons, he was just raising them, and entitled to the first clutch, so even if Cate had wanted to buy them, she would still have been sent back to them.
“I am Seeker of Secrets,” said Cate. She arched an eyebrow in Isra’s direction. “Perrin is not only a bastlekeeper, but a beastmaster as well. If there is something entombed within Pate Knob, there’s a moderate possibility that the dungeon there has been expressing it in different ways. I will, naturally, be going to the local Adventurer’s League office, to speak with Priya, but I thought I would see Perrin first.” She looked at Isra, shiny green eyes fixed in place. “You were worried I was attempting to poach your dragons.”
“I was,” said Isra. For a moment, it felt like she was going to hold the gaze with Cate, two statues looking forever into each other’s eyes, but then Isra turned away, to Perrin. “We can come back.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” said Perrin. “You can mill about, or come back later.”
“We’ll come back later,” said Isra with a curt nod.
“Hey, before we go,” said Mizuki. “Cate, were you a dungeoneer? Alfric wanted to know.”
“No,” said Cate. “I’ve never set foot in a dungeon.”
“Alright, thanks,” said Mizuki.
They left together, and by that time, some of the bad feelings had started to rub off on Mizuki.
“It was only a little suspicious,” said Mizuki once they were out of the shop.
“It felt very suspicious,” said Isra.
“Alfric thought that maybe she was just an eccentric, too many things from a dungeon,” said Mizuki. “But I guess that theory is a bust. So where’d she get her entads from?”
“A shop,” shrugged Isra, as though that particular part of it wasn’t important. In fairness, it probably wasn’t.
“Well then where’d she get her money?” asked Mizuki.
“Any number of places,” Isra shrugged. “Do you think she has a lot?”
“The quality of the entads says yes,” said Mizuki.
“You think that Perrin will stand against her?” asked Isra, glancing back at the shop.
“He should,” said Mizuki. “Seemed like a stand up guy to me. And if she rejected an offer of a hundred thousand each already, there’s an upper limit on the bribe she would be able to offer. She’s got money, but three hundred thousand would be, er, not to agree with Alfric, a huge amount. Enough to start a business, enough to buy a nice house … a lot.”
“You think I pressed too hard,” said Isra. “I was hoping that she would counteroffer.”
“And she should have,” shrugged Mizuki. “I don’t know what’s going on with her. Maybe she really does think that you should do some due diligence and doesn’t mind whether or not she gets the dragons now or later. I would kind of hate to lose Lerial, but there will be other dragons, I guess.” The thought of a hundred thousand rings did put some salve on that potential wound though, and while the final sum would undoubtedly be less, she wasn’t so smitten with the herb dragon that nothing could make her part with it.
“If she were patient, she wouldn’t have been at the bastlekeeper’s,” said Isra.
“True, if it’s not a coincidence,” shrugged Mizuki.
“Where are we going?” asked Isra. She had been letting Mizuki lead.
“We’re doing a quick lunch,” said Mizuki. “It’ll be better for us to get some food and give Perrin some space.”
“Unless he sells the dragons out from under us,” said Isra.
“Well we weren’t going to stand in the store watching him, were we?” asked Mizuki, but it seemed like that was exactly what Isra had wanted to do, even if she knew that it wasn’t something normal people did.
Lunch went slowly. Isra didn’t seem to particularly feel like talking, and Mizuki thought that might be about the dragons, but while they were waiting for their food, Isra reached for Mizuki’s bag and pulled out the bottle entad.
“Are you okay?” asked Mizuki.
“I think I’m sensitive about being stolen from,” said Isra as she looked at the bottle. The tree inside was dead, and would need to be removed, which Mizuki was still curious about.
“Well, this is one item back,” said Mizuki. “We’ll get the other.”
“I don’t think of myself as sentimental,” said Isra. She pushed the bottle forward and folded her arms, then rested her head on them so she could look at it. “But I guess I am.”
“That’s not such a bad thing to be,” said Mizuki. “I am too. I keep getting asked by people whether I’m going to be sticking around Pucklechurch, and what’s going to happen with the house, and … I don’t want to leave. I grew up in that house. I have so much history in Pucklechurch, you know?”
Isra shook her head, not taking her eyes from the bottle. “I can imagine though.”
“With Alfric I get it,” said Mizuki. “He’s been planning to leave Dondrian his whole life, he was always going to be a dungeoneer, come what may. And for Verity, life in Dondrian was all pressure and stress with people who didn’t like her or wanted to use her for their own purposes, and … whatever, it was tough for her in ways that I don’t really understand, I guess, but I’ll take her word for it. But Hannah? She never talks about her home in Cairbre and rarely mentions her sisters. I don’t get that.”
“She was young when she went into the seminary,” said Isra. “It all had time to fade.”
“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I should ask her about her family back home, but you’re right, you hear more seminary stories from her than anything else.”
“You don’t talk about your sisters that often,” said Isra.
“They were younger,” shrugged Mizuki. “Young enough that we didn’t really spend all that much time together, I guess. I didn’t see them as really being, um, people. And I get letters from them every now and then, but they’re pretty few and far between, and — Akina is really kind of a scholar, reads a lot, cares a lot about being precise on things. Chizu is the younger one, it’s kind of hard to tell what her deal is. More like me, I guess.” The truth was, she hadn’t thought about her sisters all that much in the past few years, and hadn’t mourned them being a continent away, which made her feel like a bit of a bad sister. They had been young and annoying though, and while they were probably less young and less annoying now — Akina was practically an adult, which was weird to think about — the thing that connected them was having lived together. “Huh.”
“What?” asked Isra. Their food had just arrived, and Isra reluctantly pushed the bottle to one side.
“I just haven’t thought that much about them,” said Mizuki. She looked down at her bowl of noodles, which was piled high, shaved sliced of pickled beet and thick slices of pork sitting on top of the flat noodles. “My grandfather loomed so large in my childhood, he’s the one I think about the most. He was very much a patriarch, with mom and dad kind of,” she searched for the word, and found ‘subordinate’, which sounded like it was implying a bad relationship, “less central.” That still sounded bad.
“All I had was my father,” said Isra. She glanced at the bottle, as though imagining that it would be stolen again, and when it hadn’t moved, she dug in. She had ordered a bowl of Chicken Five Ways, and Mizuki had a bit of lunch envy. From a distance, it was impossible to tell what the five ways were, but there was chicken skin, egg, and some hunks of chicken, along with plenty of herbs to give it some green.
“We’ll get the other things back,” said Mizuki. “Make an effort, anyway. We’ll find Angun and make sure he gets his punishment. And … if you wanted, we could try to figure out where you came from and why.”
Isra paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. One of the five ways was a chicken sausage, apparently. “It’s probably not interesting,” said Isra. She resumed eating. Food was good for the soul, Mizuki had always felt, and some of the worry and sadness that had been with Isra seemed to be flowing away.
“If you don’t want to know, that’s fine,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I would want to know.”
“You think it’s odd,” said Isra.
“I think as it stands, it doesn’t add up,” said Mizuki. “But if it’s not important to your life, then I guess I’ll shut my mouth about it. I can shut my mouth, when it’s appropriate.”
Isra ate more of her noodles, not saying anything until she was finished. “I want to move in with you.”
“Oh,” said Mizuki. She had been playing out conversations in her head while eating, and this wasn’t what she thought Isra would have landed on.
“I’ll need to move things,” said Isra. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the house I lived in.”
“We can figure it out,” said Mizuki. “Probably no one will want to live there?”
“Probably not,” said Isra. She seemed sad about that, and Mizuki could think of nothing to make her feel better.
“Then we can give it a funeral,” said Mizuki. “Hannah can write a nice speech, and after we’ve taken everything out of it, we can get together and celebrate the house, and it coming to an end.”
Isra nodded. “I’ve never been to a funeral either.”
“In my experience, they’re much less fun than weddings,” said Mizuki. She wanted to ask if Isra’s father hadn’t had a funeral, but kept her mouth shut, because obviously he hadn’t. “Maybe it’s a dumb idea, to have a funeral for a house.”
“No,” said Isra. “I like it.”
Mizuki smiled. “Well, do you want to go see a man about some dragons?”
“Yes,” said Isra, rising from her seat. It seemed that for a moment, she’d forgotten to be paranoid about the Seeker of Secrets.
But when they got to the bastlekeeper’s, Perrin had their dragons ready, both of them hale and hearty, munching on herbs that he had provided to them. They had grown less than Lerial had, and were just now starting to stretch their wings.
“I’ve been thinking it over, and I can release them to you,” said Perrin. “So long as you keep up your end of the bargain and give me some of the first clutch. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the missives from you, Isra, but it’s clear that your standards for care are higher than what I can provide, and it’s better to let you have them if what we’re most interested in is the breeding.”
“Can we take them today?” asked Isra.
“Ay,” nodded Perrin. “You’re a woods witch, you can keep them in check better than I. But if they escape, there will be all kinds of trouble landing squarely on your head.”
“Did she ask about them?” asked Mizuki.
Perrin eyed her. “In passing,” he said. “She said your offer was a hundred thousand for each? That seems steep, given the care and feeding they’ll need, and the uncertainty.”
“I need to know what the market is like,” said Isra. “I was also hoping that you could tell me what we can expect.”
“Well,” said Perrin, putting a hand to his chin. “Depends on what kind of buyer you can get, but if they fly, and if they can make good pets that don’t run away, then I think there’s a fair bit of money to be had. Of course, some depends on the size of the clutch and the frequency of the breeding, but people want pets all the time. Selling them for a thousand a piece, you’d need three hundred to make up what you’re asking from her, which wouldn’t be unreasonable, though it becomes less so when you take into account how much time and effort it might take.”
“People would pay a thousand?” asked Mizuki. “For a pet? You can get a cat for free.”
“A pet dragon, one of a kind, would fetch a high price,” said Perrin. “But three hundred thousand would be on the far upper limit of what they’d command, especially now, when there’s still much we don’t know.”
“If you were to buy them from us now?” asked Isra.
“Me?” asked Perrin. He picked up a pencil from the counter, but didn’t write anything with it, only tapped it against the wood as he thought. “Well now, for the set of all three, I’d say a thousand rings. That’s given how little we know, and the costs involved in raising them. There might still be some commercial possibility for them, their meat or eggs.”
“Gross,” said Mizuki. “But thanks.”
“Can you put me in contact with other bastlekeepers?” asked Isra. “The next time Cate asks, I would like to have numbers on hand. She wanted them without much conversation.”
“She’s a nice woman,” said Perrin. “Thoughtful and kind.”
“I never said otherwise,” said Isra, frowning at him.
“All the same,” said Perrin. “If you meet her as equals, you’ll be able to unload the dragons on her simply enough, and my guess is she’d pay a premium, especially if she came here with the creatures in mind.”
“I’ll try to do better,” said Isra. “Sorry.”
“No skin off mine,” said Perrin.
They got all their arrangements in place, and got ready to use the dagger back to Pucklechurch with the two new dragons in tow. Mizuki kept asking Isra whether they would get along, or how they would keep all three of them in line, and Isra kept explaining that she would handle it all, that it was just a matter of exerting her influence on them.
But it was as they were walking home from the temple that Mizuki realized something vital: the two other dragons did not yet have names. That was something that would have to be rectified at once.
