CHAPTER 81: 81: A NEW BEGINNING PART VI

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"Yes," John said. "From the White estate. Someone who carried linens, fetched water, or knew which doors hid mistakes."

Mara did not ask why he wanted this. People who ran inns learned when not to push a curiosity into a wound. She looked toward the back where a curtain moved with the rhythm of kitchen work. Then she looked back and considered the two men, one of whom was not a man at all, and made a small decision that you might miss if you had not learned to see decisions at all.

"Tonight," she said. "Behind the yard, at the old apple press. A boy named Lark will meet you. He used to run the east corridor laundry at White. He is a magpie for secrets and a coward about selling them. Which means you will pay him enough to tell the truth and not enough to change it."

"How much is that," Fizz asked.

Mara tapped the coins. "Add one to those three. And keep another three in your hand so he can see his future if his memory behaves."

"Done," John said.

Mara poured more tea because it was easier than blessing a dangerous plan. "You did not hear Lark’s name from me. If he asks, the wind told you. If he panics, say you will pay for rumor even if it turns to dust."

Fizz nodded gravely. "We are professionals."

"You are a tiny lord with a roasting vocabulary," Mara said, but she did not say it unkindly. "Go on. Spend your afternoon wisely so you can spend your evening foolishly with purpose."

Outside, the sky had hopped one shade toward afternoon. John bought chalk from the apothecary who had turned his tiny shop into a temple of powders. He paid for copper wire by the yard from a tinker who claimed every yard was longer than the last. He put in the order with the glazier for plain panes and two experimental pieces of cut glass that would catch light and bend it along a rune line like a trained dog: not peacocks, but something to make the lab less sad.

A boy from East Hollow’s caravan yard found him near the square and held out a folded note sealed with a dab of red wax. John broke it and read Moran’s hand, tidy and transactional.

"Pleasure doing business. Your honesty spends well with me. A rumor for your files: temple men asking which rooms in town have doors that do not creak. Keep your hinges oiled. Delivered with a packet of cardamom sugar for your pancake prodigy. Consider it proof I’m not all flint."

Fizz took the packet, opened it, inhaled until his ears fluttered, and then clutched it to his chest. "He understands me."

"He understands customers," John said. "It is almost the same thing."

They returned to the forge with their purchases and their news. Gael scrutinized the wire, approved the chalk, and made a face at the cut glass that said he would forgive it if it behaved.

"Do we have time to yell at Spitter Mk.1," Gael asked, meaning the strange barrel spitter they had been nursing like a temperamental goat.

"Fifteen minutes," John said. "If it bites, we bite back later."

They rolled the contraption out into the yard. It looked like a blacksmith had stared at a crossbow and a water pump and decided neither had enough bad manners. A power rune hugged its spine. A feed throat waited for crystals like a mouth that would only eat one kind of candy.

"It still chews through the small shards," Gael warned. "And the bolt sleeve sticks on the eighth push."

John knelt and examined the feed throat. He shaved a breath of metal from the lip with a file, then took a whetstone to the sleeve. He murmured to the rune as if to a horse. Fizz leaned close, far too close, and said, "What if we bribe it with a little cardamom."

"What if we do not," John said, and set a single low grade crystal into the feed.

He touched the trigger rune and sent a small, disciplined pulse of mana through the spine. The device barked once and spat a bolt into the old door they had leaned for target. The door looked offended. The device blinked its rune and did not jam.

"Again," Gael said, because once could be a lie.

John fed three more. The bark stuttered into a clatter. Two bolts hit. The third seized. The feed choked. The rune guttered.

Fizz patted the side like a doctor who likes the patient as a person. "It wants better snacks."

"We want a less expensive appetite," Gael said.

"We want a different geometry," John said, and he could almost see it — the throat shaved at a sharper angle, the sleeve grooved to accept the bolt without sulking, the rune pulled a finger’s width forward to keep the mana flow from pooling where it liked to nap.

"Not today," Gael said. "Let the machine sulk until it learns manners."

"We will teach it tomorrow," John said. "Today we have a boy to pay."

They packed Spitter Mk.1 under a tarp that hid both its promise and its foolishness, and they washed their hands with grit and water that had opinions about their fingerprints. The men finished their day’s short work.

Ruel announced he would not acknowledge any number that began with five hundred ever again. Orna threatened to toss him in a tub to prove a point. By the time the sun decided to lean its shoulder toward evening, the forge was again a place where the world made sense.

John took a small cloth bag of coins and tied it close. He tucked Moran’s packet of cardamom into his coat because Fizz would forget it otherwise and then invent a tragedy. Fizz presented himself in what he called a disguise: a bit of twine tied under his nose from which dangled a scrap of felt like a mustache trying to understand life.

"No," John said.

"Yes," Fizz said.

"Absolutely not," John said.