The night was warm, thankfully, and the weather good when Essa called the meeting and they sat down to go over the partnership agreement Durhmol had drafted. Durhmol would’ve preferred not to be making any business decision on a porch, or with Essa drinking deeply and frequently from a goblet of wine as she reviewed the document, but Fayr was confined to her mother’s eyeline, and she’d wanted to garden. It was Durhmol’s fault that Fayr had to be within sixty yards and the purview of a spell of darkvision anyway. So, the porch.
Durhmol looked at her own empty goblet, which Essa had plunked down on the table along with the bottle she was steadily working on, apparently out of courtesy. Durhmol really wanted a drink. Her sense of decorum wouldn’t allow it as Essa worked her way further down the parchment.
“You don’t look it, but I’ve gotta ask,” Essa said over the edge of her cup, “any devils in the family? Anywhere? You’re terrifyingly thorough.”
Durhmol’s shoulders bowed up around her ears. She opened her mouth to shoot something sharp back, but forced herself to shut it and take a breath. Essa glanced up from her reading. She cocked an eyebrow.
“Nothing, huh?” Another sip. “Damn.”
“This is my job,” Durhmol insisted. She kept her tone measured, but couldn’t keep herself from crossing both her arms and legs, a bad habit from her childhood that pointed every one of her sharp joints at the person opposing her. “In a sense. I went to school for it, anyway, not just playing petty shopkeep to your guild. It very literally pays to be thorough.”
Essa set her goblet down and spread the contract out on the table. She picked up her inkpen and made an annotation in the righthand margin. “You went to school for this, but can’t seem to cut yourself a better percentage. Two out of the twenty I take?”
“I assumed you would balk at that,” Durhmol admitted. Essa rolled her eyes.
“I’m not an actual hag,” she groused. “Seven is more reasonable, considering the hauls.”
Durhmol raised her eyebrows and picked at the cuff of her shirt. “Yes, the prodigious amounts of money your esteemed employees bring in every day.”
“I’ll cut you some slack because you’ve got no experience,” Essa said as she refilled her glass and kept going down the document, “but that’s how adventuring goes. You’re beating rats out of cellars for a few years, then you get a call to check out some ghosts or kobolds or whatever, and there it is— solid gold wizard throne. You learned how to play the long game in merchant college, right?”
“I did, yes.” Durhmol watched as Essa looked up, about every minute or so, and checked that Fayr was still in roughly the same spot. Her eyes had an unsettling reddish gleam because of the spell. “I just…”
Durhmol rubbed at the crease she always got between her eyebrows when she was aggravated. This seemed like such a fool’s errand. “I am not trying to wrest power from you, or siphon some ridiculous amount of money away from this guild on top of my shop’s profit, or anything like that. I’ve simply been approached a number of times by members seeking advice on investments, you know… uses for their ‘hauls,’ as you put it. It makes sense for a financial support structure to be in place within the guild’s administration, it makes sense that—”
“That you be part of the guild,” Essa finished. “Yeah, it does.”
Durhmol blinked at her for a moment. Essa sighed, abandoning the document altogether, and leaned back in her chair. The chairs were new, thick but giving woven reed, no doubt part-and-parcel of Essa’s use of the sudden gold influx from her “old friend,” which had startled Durhmol— she didn’t expect Essa to put so much of it into the common spaces. Then, she didn’t really know what she expected. To open the door to the guild hall and find Essa rolling around in a giant pile of gold, probably.
“Look,” Essa said, gesturing with her goblet in a way that made it slosh dangerously, “I wasn’t messing with you, or trying to dodge a fight when everybody came in. I do actually think it’s a damn good idea, and something we’re coming up on being past needing, because I know I don’t have a head to keep books for this place if it gets much bigger. And from the inquiries I’ve been getting, it’s going to. You just hadn’t expressed any interest in… what’d you call it, when you first came? This ‘glorified flophouse for unemployed malcontents’?”
Durhmol went a ruddy shade of brown across her cheekbones and up to the tips of her ears. “I didn’t know anyone yet.”
“No, you didn’t,” Essa said. She took a sip and raised her eyebrows. “Now you like the malcontents.”
“You weren’t exactly lowering yourself to ask for any help!” Durhmol snapped, throwing her hand out to gesture to her cottage. “I’ve been right over there since day three after your license to administer this guild was approved by the League, but all you’ve done since I arrived is mock me for having gone to school, gotten into the League, and come here at all. I fought hard to get into this situation!”
“Me too,” Essa agreed, “for all that I don’t act like it.”
Durhmol felt herself abruptly run out of steam. Her voice seemed too loud in the quiet evening, and she settled for tugging her waistcoat back into order with undue force. Essa glanced over, found Fayr pushing stones back up into the falling-down wall around the garden, looked back.
“It’s been a long road to find a home for her,” Essa said, “and that’s what I wanted this place to be. A source of income so I don’t have to back to Harrow readings and ‘authentic Varisian tattoos’ to feed us, but ultimately a home for this kid, with the kind of people she idolizes.”
Essa reached over and poured about three fingers of maroon liquid in Durhmol’s goblet.
“I thought I knew what all that’d mean, after what I’ve done, that I knew what it’d take to run a guild, easy.” Essa laughed. “Then you show up with a diploma and, really, what the fuck do I know?”
Durhmol stared at the woman as she settled back into her seat and ruminated over the last dregs in her own cup.
“You do laundry with cantrips,” Durhmol said, apparently apropos to nothing. “It’s the laziest use of magic I’ve ever witnessed.”
“And the idea of laziness pisses you off, because you’ve struggled so valiantly,” Essa drawled. She dropped her chin into a hand propped up on the table. “I’m a sorcerer, Durhmol. If I don’t use the magic in my blood, it uses itself. The last thing this place needs is a column of Hellfire because it’s been a slow three weeks and I had a nightmare. So, yeah, I do the laundry with magic. Does knowing that soothe your offense at me not toiling over a washboard?”
“I’m not offended by it,” Durhmol insisted. Her flush deepened at the obvious lie.
“You are, or you wouldn’t have brought it up right after I brought up what pissed me off about you.” Essa set her drained glass down, picked the bottle up, considered the last of the wine swirling in the bottom, and set it back down. “I hate snobbery. You hate laziness.”
“Are you perhaps trying to suggest that we both made snap judgments about each other based on very little information, and acted defensively because of unkind experiences,” Durhmol said, slowly, “and rather than perpetuate this pattern of petty sniping and groundless antagonism, we attempt to work together for the betterment of the organization?”
“I wouldn’t say it like that, but it’s still snappier than this,” Essa said, holding up Durhmol’s peitition, “which basically says the same thing, but with terrifying phrases like ‘unanimous risk assessment agreement,’ and ‘non-monetary candidate screening.'”
“It doesn’t stipulate that I attempt to like you,” Durhmol pointed out. “Which seems like it would be part of the verbal agreement.”
Essa shrugged. “Not necessarily. I’m hard to like.”
Silence stretched between them as Essa made it to the end of the document and scribbled some final notes. Durhmol leaned over, trying to make out Essa’s hand, then folded back in as Essa noticed and raised her eyebrows again.
“You misspelled my name,” she said. “Don’t break your neck snooping.”
At a loss for what else to do, Durhmol picked up her goblet and took the tiniest sip. She braced for a foulness that didn’t come. Instead, she got a mouthful of rich and slightly tart cherry. She blinked at her cup in surprise and took another sip.
“Sorry I almost had your daughter shipped to Taldor in a crate,” she muttered.
“Not your fault,” Essa said as she made her final revisions. “It’s adventurous bullshit, which I probably should’ve expected, because the only stories I’ve ever had worth telling her were adventurous bullshit.”
“I really should’ve realized what was going on when she bought, essentially, the most basic adventuring supplies possible,” Durhmol insisted, draining her glass and pouring herself the last of what was in the bottle, which Essa had generously left for her. “As well as my smallest set of leather armor.”
Essa snorted. “Yes, alright, I’ll let you blame yourself for that.”
“What is this stuff?” Durhmol asked, squinting into the cup. “It can’t be wine.”
“Of course it’s wine. I wouldn’t be drinking liquor like this,” Essa said. “Whatever my reputation.”
“I only mean, it tastes good,” Durhmol observed, “which I find is a rare quality in wine. Mead is pleasant, of course, and I had a sweet elderberry once, but virtually all other wines are quite the acquired taste. This is alarmingly agreeable.”
Essa just stared across the table at her. Durhmol slowly crossed her arms and legs again.
“What?” she demanded.
“Orcs can’t taste grapes,” Essa said, slowly, as if explaining something obvious to a small child. “Fermented or fresh. Most with even a dab of Orc blood can’t either.”
Durhmol stared at her.
“I…” she started. “I certainly taste something.”
“My artifact fence in Absalom used to say it was like pipe ash and slug leavings had a nasty lay,” Essa provided. She waved her hand and wrinkled her nose as she recounted his description. “Sort of a slimy, yet somehow dry, bitter burst of… ick?”
Durhmol suddenly better understood a number of frustrating memories, from endless and intolerable merchant’s college soirees right down to what a baffled Lord Dolmand referred to as “The Jelly Incident,” which occurred when she was just thirteen years old. The revelations must have shown on her face because Essa’s expression slowly transitioned from confusion to something harder to read. Durhmol’s shoulders climbed up around her ears again and she felt herself subconsciously rolling her jaw forward.
“Does me not knowing that amuse you?” Durhmol snapped, though Essa’s expression had slipped further as she spoke, into something more like grief.
“No! Sarenrae above, you’d think I’d stabbed you at some point, the way you accuse me of nastiness,” Essa protested. “It’s just…”
She turned to look out at the garden again. Fayr seemed to have run out of things to do, and had taken to just sitting on the wall, staring out at the main road. Tired, but not ready to come in yet. Her new smoked glass spectacles bounced against her tunic, taken off and left to hang from her collar, as she swung her feet and looked out onto near-complete darkness, even to Durhmol’s eyes.
“Just makes me wonder what she’ll find out late, ’cause I didn’t know it to tell her about it,” Essa said.
Durhmol’s outrage left her abruptly. She focused on finishing her glass and mentally calculating the windfall she was about to receive in selling her carefully curated and much hated wine collection so she wouldn’t have to think of something appropriate to say. After long enough, though, words came anyway.
“I think…” she mused, barely two glasses of wine still managing to make her feel a little sentimental, which was mortifying, “that you can only do the best you can, you know? Fa— Lord Dolmand couldn’t have known about grapes. But he knew about plenty of other things I might have never been exposed to were it not for his care, and his commitment to the quality of my life and education.”
Essa propped her chin on a hand again. “Focus on the successes, not the failures?”
“At least she’ll know about grapes?” Durhmol ventured.
“She loves grapes,” Essa said, dismissively. Durhmol coughed and decided to give up guessing.
“Whatever… However things may be,” she pronounced, “you’re trying. And you love her. These comprise the minimal threshold for parenting, yes, but in my experience it is often not met.”
“And I suppose I can always turn to other people to make up for the things I don’t know as a human,” Essa said, “like math.”
Durhmol choked on an unexpected laugh. “You cannot convince me that not knowing math is an inherent human attribute. Countless numbers of my tutors, professors, and classmates over the years have been human.”
“Okay, but are you sure?” Essa goaded, pushing herself upright with a bit of a wobble. She stuck an accusing finger out at Durhmol. “Do you know, though?”
Durhmol didn’t try to argue further. She was starting to get a sense of when Essa was joking, unrefined as her humor might be, and Fayr was headed towards the porch. The girl took the steps two at a time and made a beeline for the door. Essa gathered up the empty wine bottle and her glass, then cleared her throat.
“Fayr,” she said, “apologize to Lady Vix for duping her into selling you adventuring gear.”
“I didn’t dupe her,” Fayr protested. “I walked up and said, ‘I have fifty gold and a list.'”
“She did,” Durhmol conceded as she picked up the revised petition from the table and rolled it up. With a sort of misplaced pride, she added, “It was very well itemized.”
Essa flapped a hand at her daughter. “We’re going to have a longer conversation about where you even got fifty gold—”
“—I stabbed Victor,” Fayr cut in.
“And gold fell out?” Durhmol asked, rising herself. Fayr shook her head, paused, made an expression like she was considering something, then slowly nodded. Essa burst out laughing.
“Rogues,” she managed. After she calmed down a bit she shook her head. “Fine. Apologize to Lady Vix for hiding in one of her shipping crates and making her feel terrible about it.”
“I’m sorry for hiding in one of your shipping crates and making you feel terrible about it,” Fayr recited to Durhmol. Then added, “I would’ve come out, you know. I wouldn’t have died in there and gotten you in trouble for sentient creature trafficking.”
“That’s… not what I was initially upset about, but I will now take that narrowly avoided possibility into anxious consideration as well,” Durhmol said. She stared at Essa, who seemed to be chewing her bottom lip to keep from laughing again. “Well. I will, ah… make the necessary amendments to this agreement and… going forward…”
Essa interrupted any further fumbling by sticking out her hand. Durhmol shook it. Somehow it felt like the most professional portion of the whole evening. That is, until Essa tugged her in a few inches and said, “Now, how are you going to break the news to the Mercantile League, partner?”
“Abadar help me,” Durhmol croaked.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10/20/2017 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024
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