And yet Fleur did not know if she was successfully hiding her feelings. Such childish words were trying to come out of her mouth because other feelings swirled about in her chest.
She looked at Milton through the gap in her scarf.
He had youthful, noble, sensible features, and his expression was soft and his voice quiet as he spoke. “It may sound like a poor joke, but this is truly all I can say—”
They had arrived at the edge of town, and Milton stopped.
“—Please, at least trust me.”
She realized a moment later that her own smile was narrowing her view.
Here at the inspection station at the edge of town there were farmers from nearby villages bringing goods in, and as the sun climbed higher, the last travelers to set out were paying their taxes and arguing with the inspectors.
There were oxen and horses, and along with the poultry in various wagons, it was a very noisy place.
But none of that noise seemed to penetrate Fleur’s attention.
“…That’s not a very convincing case.”
“I know. I wasn’t even able to get you to remember my face.”
Fleur very clearly laughed under her scarf, then took a breath. Maybe being driven from the manor had not been such a bad fate.
“Push, pull, push again…
“Catch a butterfly, a cat, a hair, a fox…”
It was a line from a poem that poked fun at young nobles playing at love. There was surely no one else in this town able to hear the little verse and laugh at it.
Fleur and Milton shared merry laughter, which eventually faded like ripples in water.
Fleur then let quiet words slip from her lips. “I’ll trust you, then.”
It was not a long statement, but far weightier than the lengthy contracts merchants so frequently drew up.
Milton nodded seriously, then let go of the horse’s reins. “I shall rely on it.”
Fleur took his offered hand. “As will I,” she replied.
Milton then immediately retook the reins, looking at the horse, then back to Fleur. “I’d like to stay here, if possible.”
His earnest face was too earnest by half.
“Surprisingly skillful words.”
“The moment of falling is decided in the manner of parting.”
“To feign interest so that I lie awake all night unable to think of anything but you?” Fleur herself was surprised at how smoothly the words slipped from her mouth. It was surprisingly refreshing to dust off the rusted old mask of nobility that had lain buried at the bottom of her mind for so long.
“If my hand is so easy to read, perhaps I’m unfit to be a merchant.”
“Oh? I haven’t even yet asked when next we might meet.”
It was not such a bad thing to play the part of a nobleman’s daughter, pining away for her knight so desperately that a single day felt like an eternity.
“In the evening, three days hence.”
“I shall be waiting.” Her body moved of its own accord—no doubt her noble blood reasserting itself. Her chin rose, but she still lowered it and averted her eyes deceptively.
Milton pretended not to notice. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said and began to walk away. The clop, clop of his horse’s hooves faded into the distance.
“In the evening, three days hence.” She murmured the words to herself as she watched Milton’s form recede, and for the first time, she realized her hand was clasped to her breast. She hastily removed it, smoothing the wrinkled material of her clothing.
Milton greeted the guard at the inspection station and passed through unhindered.
He looked back only once.
Fleur turned and walked the opposite direction, as though she did not care about Milton at all. She could not bear to look at him any longer.
“In the evening, three days hence.”
As she headed back into the city’s tumult as it awakened and began to work, Fleur repeated the words to herself again, as though they were the name of some treasure.
The spring sun shone down.
In the city, buildings were packed so closely to one another that it was sometimes impossible to even slip a single piece of paper between the houses. Where once sunlight could be taken for granted, now it was a luxury commodity. And when even something that fell in unlimited quantities from the heavens was a luxury, life on the earth was hard indeed.
Such idle thoughts ran through Fleur’s mind as she leaned on the windowsill and rested her chin in her hands, watching songbirds gather around the midday meal’s leftover crusts.
“Milady,” came an ill-timed voice, finally.
But Fleur was not angry as she continued to stare out the window, because even she knew that it was Olar, who had the right to anger.
“Milady!” The birds flew off at the suddenly loud voice.
At this, Fleur finally raised her head and turned lazily in the direction of the voice. “Why must you yell so?”
“If yelling is what convinces you to listen, then yell I shall!”
“Yes, yes…it’s just, the weather is so fine…” Fleur yawned, then stretched grandly in the chair.
On the desk were several sheets of paper as well as a quill pen and ink. One of the sheets was covered in smooth-handed writing.
It was a list of common words and phrases used in contracts between merchants. It included terms like purchase and disposal, loan and borrow, and all their usages, as well as all the ways one might pray to God.
Merchants had a whole vocabulary unique to them, as they often had cause to trade with people from far-flung lands. Small trades were one thing, but misreading a single line or clause in a contract involving fortunes could utterly ruin a merchant in a single instant.
When dealing with those who would prey upon one’s inattention given the slightest opportunity, one had to be at least slightly prepared for battle.
Fleur thought on Olar’s exaggerated warnings and turned over another sheet of paper. On it was a large table of currencies and their names. Beside the names were the exchanges rates with other coins, all of which seemed like so much esoteric spell craft to Fleur.
But to become a proper merchant, she had to have a general grasp of such knowledge. She didn’t have to be told as much to know it was true.
“Milady,” came the flat voice, the one that came out when he was truly angry.
Fleur looked back at Olar, then furrowed her brow. “Don’t be so angry at me. I hate being like this myself, you know.”
Olar was clever enough to know she wasn’t talking about her restlessness in the face of the nice weather.
The wrinkles in his forehead reached all the way to the top of his head, and he regarded her with a single open eye—which meant his next words had been very carefully considered. Olar was both extremely clever and possessed of a deep sense of duty.
Even in the face of such foolishness on Fleur’s part, his treatment of her was meticulously courteous.
“Milady, as your ledger keeper and your tutor, I must speak my mind.”
“Mm,” replied Fleur, whereupon she was met by the following words.
“Be careful not to misunderstand the truth.”
It was an irritating insinuation to hear. Merchants excelled at constructing such maddeningly vague statements, and if she tried to turn it back upon him, there was no telling how many different ways he could twist the meaning.
Hearing those words, her smile clouded over as she hit upon the realization.
Olar rubbed his head and continued. “I don’t particularly wish to say this, but the master of the Post family came to prosperity by wooing the widow of the former lord. Rumors swirl that the disposition of all the family lands and wealth is decided within ladies’ bedchambers. What I mean is—”
“What you mean is that Milton, being of that blood, is an unparalleled rake.” Fleur stared at the wall behind the desk as the words were drawn out of her.
Perhaps the songbirds outside the window ha
d returned; their chirped songs could be heard coming through it. Perhaps the high voice that joined them was a child, scampering around on the streets.
Then the low sigh of the house’s wise man joined them.
“After all, he is Milton, a man who trades with the nobility. Surely it’s so, is it not? And I’m a mere girl.”
“…I would not go that far, but…”
“It’s fine. I know it myself. My feet aren’t on the ground. It feels like if I were to jump from the windowsill there, I could just fly away,” Fleur said, narrowing her eyes at the bright sunlight that shone down onto the courtyard garden.
Olar opened his mouth to speak, but in the end, he swallowed his words. His old master had been Fleur’s former husband. And he’d seen every detail of how she had been wedded to the man. Fleur knew that Olar felt more agony over the union than she had.
There was probably a degree of atonement in the way he had come to her aid when the Bolan house had fallen, leaving her on the verge of wandering the road alone. And so even when this poor daughter of fallen nobility found herself stricken with something that couldn’t really be called love, he still felt it would be cruel to make her just throw it away.
That was probably it.
It was just a guess, of course, but she doubted it was far from the mark—and might well have been exactly right.
Fleur returned her gaze to the room and smiled self-consciously. “But business is business. People change when profit is involved. Isn’t that right?” It was one of the things Olar had taught her.
The grizzled old merchant nodded regretfully but nonetheless firmly.
“Anyway, you can’t put any trust in what someone says with their mouth. That’s—”
“The mark of a true merchant, milady.”
He skillfully completed her thought, and she managed to give him a natural-looking smile.
The kindly old merchant was obviously relieved to see this, which meant that her own course of action was clear.
Fleur quietly cleared her throat and straightened up. The desk was full of things she needed to memorize.
“I’ll do it. I’ll do it, all right? So would you kindly leave me to it?”
Olar took a moment to think this over, then took his leave of her with exaggerated politeness.
Fleur continued to face the door after it was closed, smiling in spite of herself.
They were both so kind to her. She knew she had to make sure their trust wasn’t misplaced and to protect them.
Fleur scratched her nose lightly, shrugging her shoulders in amusement at her own ambition. She then picked the quill pen up and turned to the material on the desk with renewed seriousness.
Trusting a man’s word that upon their parting he would return in three days was the stuff of silly poetry and had no place in the real world, and Fleur was well aware that trading did not always proceed according to plan.
On the evening of the fourth day, when a message arrived from Milton saying that there had been a delay and he would be unable to return for a time, Fleur was not particularly disappointed. If anything, the news seemed to affect Olar more.
And it was not as though she was sitting in her room basking in sunbeams as she waited for him. The days were very busy.
The Jones Company, which had introduced her to Milton, contacted her to inquire about the purchase of hay, and for a week she was a frequent visitor to the portside trading company.
In the morning and evenings she received impromptu lessons from Olar about clothing, on subjects like knitted woolen fabrics and woven linens. However, be the components animal or vegetable in origin, or even something she had never heard of originating in some far-off land, it was doubtful whether what she learned of them then and there would last two days.
After all, in the case of something like wool, the places where they were born differed from where they were raised, as did the locations of shearing and dyeing. And there was the matter of the towns where spinning and weaving guilds did their work, to say nothing of fulling or milling. There was no room for her to remember which goods then sold most easily at which towns.
Even if she could memorize everything Olar knew off the top of his head, Fleur herself doubted it was really sinking in.
She even talked about her struggles with one of the traders she saw on her trips to the trading company—surprisingly, the same man who’d tried to underpay her before.
The man—whose name was Hans—smiled as he sympathized with her. “It was the same for me.”
“Really?” Fleur couldn’t help saying out of pure surprise.
“Of course. There’s so much to remember, and trying to pack it all into my head, it felt like I was going to forget my own name,” said Hans, the same man who’d tried to renege on his promised price after Fleur had hauled stinking herring up and musty, dusty hay down.
Fleur felt shocked out of her own skin.
“But you’ve got nothing to complain about given that fine tutor of yours. Us apprentices get nothing but the strap or the rolling pin if we’re unlucky enough to work for a baker.”
“Olar…er, I mean, that ‘fine tutor’ said the same thing. I was so sure he was making it up!” Fleur laughed, which made Hans roll up his shirtsleeves and bare his arms.
“This is from when I was whipped. I was learning to write, using shells on slate, and I’d gotten white all the way up to my elbow. The dust was beat clean off me.” Next he pointed to a spot on his left arm where hair no longer naturally grew. “And here’s where I burned myself with a candle trying to keep awake late one night.”
He spoke of the memories as though they were pleasant ones, but even those who seemed like they were born knowing everything about the world had suffered and toiled to gain that wisdom. Fleur could understand, then, why he might have looked down on her or regarded her with a certain amount of derision. It must have been irritating to anyone who had worked so hard when someone like Fleur demanded to be treated as a peer, despite not having earned the right.
“Some of the other apprentices seemed to be born clever, so I swore I wouldn’t lose to them, which led me to do such things. Even now I’m a bit proud of it. If you work hard, you can succeed. On the other hand…” Hans stopped in the middle of his fluent expounding and smiled self-consciously. “Sorry, I talk too much.”
He hardly needed to finish his statement.
If you work hard, you can succeed—but on the other hand, even a naturally clever child won’t get anywhere without hard work.
That confidence was what led merchants to make fun of nobles and kings and led directly to their peculiar strength.
They feared nothing. Fleur found herself asking if that meant they had nothing to lose, nothing they wanted to protect.
“We can’t hold a candle to monks,” said Hans after a moment of thought, letting a not-unimpressed expression flicker across his face. “Unlike them, we merchants are filled with worldly desires.”
“Even monks have the desire for their own salvation, or if not that, for the salvation of others, I should think.” The words that came from Fleur’s mouth as she looked at Hans were ones Olar often spoke, but now they were her words, spoken as someone who’d seen the monks receive tithes from the Bolan family with her very eyes.
Hans regarded her appraisingly, stroking his chin as he did so.
Until very recently, Fleur might well have found the gesture a rude, cold-blooded one. But now it just seemed to her like a charmingly merchant-like habit.
“You might be right. If so, perhaps we’re similar to those monks. Instead of a land without sickness or death, we work for a land without loss or bankruptcy,” he said, amused. “’Twould be paradise,” he added quietly to himself.
Merchants pursued profit above all else, relentlessly, tirelessly, seeing only that—they regarded all others with suspicion and would betray even a faithful comrade in service to their avarice.
Everything was for profit. Always profit.
Ti
tles like lord or king held no meaning for them. After all, to become a good merchant, one endured lashings and burnt one’s own flesh just to stay awake, while a king or lord was such merely by fortunate accident of birth.
“Might I ask you something?” Fleur said. They faced each other, and after all their conversation over the past several days, it seemed silly to hide her face. There just hadn’t been an obvious opportunity for her to remove her scarf, but she now did so.
She did not know if he would understand her gesture as the compromise that it was, but his expression as he said, “Please do,” was a gentle one.
“What is it that makes you work so hard?” Fleur felt she had an inkling, but she wanted to know for certain.
There might be any number of practical reasons, ones even a girl raised in a forest-rimmed manor could imagine. And yet Fleur asked because she thought he might give another sort of answer—a secret one, one that might validate her own secret hopes.
“Ha, that’s what you want to know?”
“I-is it such a strange thing?” She smiled an embarrassed smile, a gesture well practiced from so many banquets with gossipy aristocrats.
“Not at all…I understand the sentiment. I’ve wanted to ask my own master the same thing, truthfully. But at the moment I’m just one merchant in a vast ocean. Asking me why I work so hard to accomplish so little makes me feel rather embarrassed.”
So he had yet to gain anything to show for his effort.
Fleur mused that she would probably have remembered Hans’s face forever if this conversation had not come so soon after he’d so brazenly tried to beat down her selling price when she had dealt with his company. For all his avarice, he was awfully humble.
Merchants were a strange bunch.
“I was the fourth son of a poor farmer’s family, so I’m fortunate to even be alive. I left home with nowhere to go and nowhere to return to, and when this trading company brought me in, I had no choice but to cling to them. Although in honesty many apprentices did not make it.” Hans spoke with a measure of bashfulness, lightly scratching his nose in an effort to hide it. It was a boyish and charming gesture. Eyes used to scorning or mocking others were now tinged with a melancholy nostalgia.