Chapter 7
Genevieve
The ears were round and set high on his head. The face was broad and dark-muzzled. The hands wrapped around the tray were the right number of fingers, but considerably wider than any hands I had seen on any person in either world I had now inhabited.
He was enormous in the way that made you reconsider every prior understanding of the word — easily twice my width, brown fur visible above his collar, apron tied around a middle that could have doubled as a load-bearing wall.
Bear. He was a bear. He was a bear who was also, apparently, a person. Both of these things were true simultaneously and my brain kept trying to pick one and failing.
Fine, I thought, with the particular clarity of someone who has been awake too long and eaten too little and cried until the rain stopped. Fine. A bear. Of course it's a bear. I've been in this world for less than a week, I've already lost several jobs, I have seven coins to my name, and now there is a bear outside the door. This is completely normal. This is fine.
He looked down at me.
I looked up at him.
Honestly, said some exhausted, borderline-delirious part of my brain, if he just ate me right now, at least I'd be warm on the way out.
He set the tray on the stone block beside the step, looked at me with large, dark, perfectly round eyes, and said, "You look terrible. Have you eaten today? Don't answer that, I can tell you haven't — there's a specific look people get, and you've got it, very classic, I see it maybe twice a week in this neighborhood — I put oatcakes on the tray, there's cider too, it's hot, not fancy but hot is what matters right now, and the step's wet even when the rain stops so you'll want to come inside before the cold works back up through your coat." He paused, appearing to genuinely consider something. "It will. I've seen it happen. Come inside when you're ready. Door's open."
Then he went back inside, leaving the door open behind him.
I stared at the tray.
I stared at the door.
I was still in the middle of forming a thought about whether to go in — something along the lines of I don't know this person, I don't know this city, I don't know anything about bear-people etiquette, and the sensible thing would be to assess the situation before — when the door opened again and one large hand reached out, picked up the tray from the stone block, and deposited it into my arms.
"Careful, it's hot," Barnaby said, and went back inside.
I stood on the wet step holding a tray.
I looked at the door.
I looked at the tray.
I went inside, because apparently the most dangerous-looking thing I had encountered in this entire city was also the only one who had thought to ask whether I'd eaten, and also because I was now holding his tray and it seemed rude to leave it on the step.
The warmth hit my face before I'd fully crossed the threshold. I felt my hands start to tingle. I had not noticed, until they stopped, how cold my fingers had become.
"Wet clothes on the hook," he said, without looking up from the worktable — and then, apparently reconsidering, he turned around, raised one large hand, and made a brief, unhurried gesture in my direction.
The warmth hit me all at once. Not the ambient warmth of the room, but something more deliberate — a dry, even heat that moved from my collar to my hem in the space of two seconds, pulling the damp out of my coat and hair and the cold out of my fingers with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had done this before and would do it again and did not consider it worth mentioning.
My coat, still on my back, went from soaked to merely cool. My hair stopped dripping.
"There," he said, and turned back to the dough. "Stool's in the corner. I'm Barnaby, by the way. Barnaby Groft. Oak Barrel Bakery, though you can read that on the sign."
He glanced over his shoulder. "You're new here, aren't you? Don't think I've seen you before."
"Yes," I said. "Just arrived."
"Thought so. No one who's lived in this district more than a week takes a drying spell that calmly." He tilted his head. "Or that wide-eyed."
I had not realized I'd been wide-eyed. "Where I came from," I said, after a moment, "there wasn't much magic. Any magic, really."
Barnaby set down his basket and turned around properly, the way you do when a conversation has earned your full attention. "No magic at all? Which part of the empire is that?"
"The very edge of it," I said, which was technically not a lie, if you were willing to be extremely generous about the definition of "edge."
He accepted this without suspicion, in the way that only a person who has never had reason to doubt the world tends to do. "Well," he said, settling against the worktable, "you've landed somewhere interesting, then. Valarean Empire — dragon rule, going on three hundred years now. Current emperor's not the worst we've had, strict but fair, or that's what people say when they want to stay out of trouble." He reached for another loaf.
"Magic's everywhere down here in the lower districts — utility spells mostly, drying, warming, fixing things that break. Nothing fancy. Fancy magic's for the upper tiers." A pause. "And the Tribunal, but you don't want to meet them on a bad day."
"Noted," I said. "Is there somewhere I could learn? Basic spells, utility work — the kind that doesn't get people arrested."
Barnaby considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Library on Coppice Street has primers, if you can read Old Valarean. Most of the practical stuff's in guild manuals, but those cost." He tilted his head. "Honestly? Best way is just to watch. People do it everywhere here."
"Give it a week and you'll start picking up the small ones without meaning to." He paused, something shifting in his expression. "Mind you, the city's a bit more complicated than usual right now."
"The main thing to know," he added, "is that the stone-sickness has been spreading again. Petrification plague — starts in the outer districts, works inward. Tribunal's handling it, supposedly." He said the last word in the tone of someone who had opinions he'd decided not to voice. "Just don't touch anything that looks grey and wrong. You'll know it when you see it."
"Anyway—" he glanced over his shoulder. "That building next door," he said, in the tone of someone raising a topic they've been politely holding off on. "Been empty fifteen years. Step's barely got an overhang on it." A pause. "Wasn't keeping much rain off you."
"Why are you sitting out there?"
I opened my mouth. I had something forming — something neutral, something that would redirect the conversation — and then Barnaby had already turned back to the dough, apparently content to let the question sit there unanswered for as long as it needed to.
"Fair enough," he said cheerfully, as if I had answered. "None of my business. The woman who ran it before — drinks, she made, all sorts — she just disappeared one day. Left everything. Nobody came back for it. Landlord tried to rent it out twice, both times fell through. Been sitting there ever since." He shook his head. "Shame. Good bones in that building."
I had not said a single word, I thought, and this conversation had already moved on without me.
I found the stool. I sat down. I lifted the cover off the dish.
Oatcakes. Six of them, thick and warm. A cup of cider, simple and slightly tart, still steaming.
Barnaby was sorting his end-of-day inventory now, moving between two baskets with a small hovering light trailing behind him — a pale, self-directed spell that illuminated whichever shelf he was reaching toward, apparently without him having to ask.
He reached for a batch of oat loaves and moved them toward the tomorrow basket.
"Those won't hold," I said.
Barnaby turned around, ears perking. "Won't they?"
"Oats absorb moisture faster than wheat. They'll go stiff overnight, crust soft in the wrong direction. Still edible, but you won't move them at full price."
"You're right." He moved them to the other basket without hesitation. "End of the day gets long and I stop thinking clearly." He beamed at me. "You've done this kind of work before. I can always tell."
Something in my chest did a thing I wasn't prepared for — not crying, I was done with that, I had made a decision about that on the doorstep. Something smaller. The specific sensation of being taken seriously by someone who had no particular reason to.
Barnaby was still talking, easy and unhurried, and somewhere in the middle of a sentence about the rooming house on Tinker's Lane he mentioned, almost as an aside, that there was a merchant services office in the lower district — revitalization lending, long-term vacant buildings, property as collateral, pay back through revenue.
"Terms aren't great," he said, moving the last of the stock. "But it's a door, if you're looking for one."
Property. Vacant.
Why don't I just buy this place myself — stay alive while I figure out how to get back, figure out what those drifting wisps actually are and why they ease the sickness, and maybe, if I'm very lucky, find a way to be rid of it entirely.
