Once the storage room was emptied, Benedict transferred the boxes onto the waiting wagon at the mouth of the alleyway while I managed the cart — filling it with as many crates as it could hold per trip, carrying them out, loading, returning. Minimal work in terms of complexity. In terms of physical effort, it should have been exhausting.
It wasn't. The dragon's strength I was still growing accustomed to make the boxes feel considerably lighter than their size suggested, and the repetition that would normally accumulate into fatigue simply didn't.
Benedict watched me lift four stacked crates in a single motion and carry them without apparent difficulty.
"Easy there, lad — don't overdo it," he said, with the slightly worried tone of a man who has seen people injure themselves trying to prove a point.
"I'm not," I said, and kept moving.
After several more runs, the evidence had arranged itself plainly: I was barely perspiring, while Benedict — sturdy, experienced, constitutionally suited to this kind of work — had soaked through the back of his outer shirt, and the wagon driver, a man in his forties, was breathing with the laboured concentration of someone near his limit.
"Let's switch," I told Benedict, nodding toward the wagon.
He started to refuse on principle, then looked me over with the appraising frown of someone reluctantly revising their assumptions.
"How are you not tired?" He studied me for a moment. "I'm getting old." He waved me toward the wagon with a resigned hand.
We switched. The remaining crates were loaded in a fraction of the time.
Footsteps approached from the far end of the alleyway.
"You're done already?" Reichert appeared around the corner, taking in the three fully loaded wagons with visible surprise. His eyes moved to Benedict.
"Just finished the last one," Benedict said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he grinned — a wide, unguarded thing — and turned toward me with the enthusiasm of someone who has discovered something worth sharing. "This lad right here is something else. Did most of the heavy work without so much as breaking a sweat." He crossed to me and delivered a solid, approving thump between my shoulder blades. "Good work."
I accepted this with a nod, doing my best to look appropriately modest.
The three wagons departed together for the fair grounds, the silver eagle emblem carved into the side panels of each. Reichert occupied the first wagon; I was placed on the second; Benedict and his driver took the third. The streets were coming alive around us — shutters being opened, stall covers being drawn back, the particular busy hum of a city's commercial districts finding their morning rhythm, threaded through with the smell of food from the early vendors setting up along the roadsides.
We reached the fair grounds to find security checks already underway at the bureau building entrance. The wagons stopped.
I saw Gayathri approaching before she reached us.
She moved with her usual composed efficiency, a sheaf of papers in her hands, her appearance as carefully assembled as always despite the faint shadows under her eyes that told a different story. She had been working extraordinarily hard for this fair. I felt a pang of guilt, looking at those shadows.
She reached the first wagon and produced a bright, professional smile.
"Good morning, Mister Reichert!" She directed the full warmth of it at him with the easy friendliness she applied to everyone. Then her gaze swept the rest of us, taking a brief inventory. "I see you managed to find some additional help."
Her eyes passed over the crew and landed, briefly, on me.
I kept my expression neutral and my posture unremarkable. I knew the disguise was solid. I knew there was nothing for her to find. And yet something in the particular sharpness of her attention — the attention of someone who notices things before she names them — made me hold very still for a moment.
She looked away.
Reichert, meanwhile, had arranged his features into the polished, warmly professional expression of a guild leader conducting relations with an important contact, which was a noticeably different face from any of the others I had seen him wear so far.
"Mistress Gayathri." He reached into his coat for the wagon manifest — a detailed list of the contents — and offered it to her. "We were fortunate. Thank you again for your efforts on our behalf."
She took the papers with one hand, and with the other stifled a small, involuntary yawn that she covered immediately. The exhaustion was more visible up close.
"I'm glad it worked out. One fewer thing to manage." She flipped through the papers with the speed of someone who has been doing this long enough to know exactly what she's looking for. "One reminder — the guild leaders have an audience with his Majesty at ten o'clock sharp. Please don't be late."
*Arvid is meeting the guild leaders.*
The information landed quietly and stayed. Throughout all the fair preparations, he had shown no particular interest in the event — delegated, deferred, remained at a courteous but notable distance from the whole enterprise. And now, apparently, he had arranged an audience with the merchant guild leaders the morning before opening day.
What was he thinking?
"I haven't forgotten," Reichert said, with the same polished smile. "I'll be there at ten precisely."
"Wonderful." Gayathri returned the smile with one of her own, genuine rather than professional. "Seeing you in the morning has rather improved my mood, if I'm honest. I'm grateful for small things today."
My hands, somewhere at my sides, formed fists without my full permission.
I looked at the wagon wheel and said nothing.
---
We were through the security check and into the fair grounds before long, and then the work began in earnest.
I understood, within the first hour, exactly why every local hire before me had left.
The labour itself was straightforward — carrying goods from the wagons, unpacking crates, passing pieces to be arranged on the display shelves inside the stall. None of it was beyond ordinary physical capability. What made it difficult was Reichert.
He was a perfectionist of the specific, exhausting variety — not chaotic or arbitrary, but possessed of a clear and exacting internal vision for how things should be arranged, one that bore no obligation to communicate itself in advance and revealed itself instead through the particular expression that crossed his face when something had been placed incorrectly. Which was often.
The stall itself was well-constructed — solid wooden shelving along the interior walls, a sturdy frame overhead, the water-resistant fabric canopy drawn across the top to provide shade. Getting the goods off the wagons was the simple part.
Arranging them was another matter entirely.
Three pieces I had placed on shelves were silently relocated — Reichert simply picked each one up and moved it to a different position without comment, but the brief, eloquent look of dissatisfaction that preceded each correction communicated everything that the silence did not. I was not the only member of the crew receiving this treatment, which was mildly consoling. The others had stopped reacting to it with anything except quiet compliance.
I was finding, to my own slight annoyance, that I minded it more than I should have. Each time that gaze settled on something I had done and found it wanting, I felt a small, disproportionate pang — not quite hurt, not quite wounded, but something adjacent to both.
I put a necklace display on the third shelf from the left, and waited.