Chapter 1 Sage #2
The back of Sage’s neck begins to prickle, the way it does whenever the wind shifts in the forest, carrying the scent of trouble across her path.
Only a frayed thread of self-restraint stops her from reaching for one of the daggers holstered at her hip; this isn’t the kind of trouble to be solved with a blade. Not yet anyway.
“Ah well, yes.” The Agent scrubs his knuckles across his beard.
“Unfortunately, there’s the matter of our agreed-upon timeline.
You’ll recall, my client’s contract required the goods to be delivered by summer’s end, before the start of the academic year.
But as you can tell from the indecent state of the trees and that frost in the air, the deadline has rather passed. ”
Now, Sage isn’t sure whether her dagger would find its sheath in the Agent’s chest or Gaffa’s.
Their party leader scrubs a road-dusty hand down her face. “We met with unexpected dangers along the way. Your client is getting a bargain. We could charge for every lost finger.”
Jamile smiles uneasily across the table.
“And I am very sympathetic to that. Unfortunately, again, the contract is not.” Tugging a legal scroll from his inner coat pocket, he offers it up, and Jamile takes it with their modified hand. “There were no amendments for additional compensation in case of injury nor extensions.”
The warlock frowns, reading, as Reece and Raisa begin to growl in protest.
Sage doesn’t bother. Of course Gaffa failed to negotiate a contract with contingencies, then blew their deadline by signing them up for an impulsive and ill-thought-out side quest. If she’d been running things…
No, she’s got to stop thinking that way.
Sage isn’t like Jamile, the scion of an adventuring legacy family who just happens to prefer following over leading.
And she never attended one of the better academies in Harrow, where she might’ve made connections as Gaffa did (though maybe if she’d stuck around long enough to graduate from the college in Olde Post, she’d have gotten lucky).
If Sage was to sign on permanently with a party—or to linger for more than one mission, at least—she could have steadier work and higher shares.
With no tide to lift her ship, she must steer herself alone through the narrows and rapids of this world.
But that’s the way she likes it, isn’t it?
Just then, the barkeep approaches, all six tankards miraculously clutched between their knotty fingers. They set them down on the tabletop with a slosh of liquid, white and foamy and lightly pungent-smelling.
“Ah.” The Agent tips forward to peer into his tankard. “And this is…”
“Mare’s Milk.” The barkeep grunts. “House special.”
“The titular drink. I might’ve guessed. My thanks, sir’ram.”
The barkeep retreats, replaced by a young kitchen hand struggling under the weight of a copper pot half her size, with a stack of newspapers tucked beneath one arm.
She sets down the pot, fans the papers out in the center of the table with one hand, and then, with a grunt, spills the pot’s contents right onto the papers.
Whole crab parts tumble out alongside corncobs, coal-sized potatoes, and chopped sausage that might have come from any beast in the kingdom.
The Agent’s eyebrows twitch upward in surprise.
The man must have two decades on Sage at least, and looks as though he’s spent them at sea, but doesn’t know what a boil is?
The party stops grumbling long enough to grab a tankard each of sour, fizzy milk-turned-to-liquor, and to swarm the tavern’s “signature dish.” Sage’s stomach groans so loudly, it’s all she can do to crack the meat out of the crab legs, rather than sliding them down her throat shell and all.
If she’s not to be properly paid, she may as well be full.
Sage leaves the Mare’s Milk with her pack slung over her shoulder, a shallow palmful of gold denaris in one pocket, and a boiled corncob wrapped in a spare bit of newspaper in the other.
She turns the coins over and over, letting them clink between her fingertips.
This will buy her a room and food for a few weeks, at least. More if she sticks to leather stew instead of pheasant or boar.
She blames her rage for the fact that it takes two blocks to realize she’s being followed.
Not good.
Cheeks burning, Sage marches steadily forward against the damp autumn wind, chin tucked into her coat collar, moving inland.
Beyond the harborside warehouses is the district of large brick factory buildings, scattered through with rickety housing and rented rooms for the city’s laborers and its poor (largely one and the same).
Whoever her tail is, she’ll lose them in the skinny streets and alleyways and bolt-holes.
Few guards patrol here, but as a rule, Sage prefers to handle things on her own.
Gods forbid she end up in a cell in the courthouse alongside some eleven-year-old pickpocket because the guards were too impatient to untangle the source of the trouble.
When she passes a cluster of sailors carrying casks and trunks and spools of rope in the direction of the docks, she takes advantage of the cover to duck sideways into a lane.
The housing here is built like fishermen’s shacks piled precariously atop one another, all weathered gray boards and dented tin roofs.
Sage knows places like this one well. Everyone of working age will be away in the surrounding factories, or down at the docks, or serving drinks in one of Kingfisher’s plentiful taverns.
Children dart through the streets in laughing packs, watched by grandparents or elder community members from their stoops.
Almost the moment she starts down the lane, Sage turns again to slip between two stacks of houses, built so close together that the overhanging metal roofs blot out the sky above completely.
From here, she veers into the alleyway behind a cannery, inaccessible from the main road.
She steps soundlessly over broken glass littering broken cobblestones to melt into shadow behind a dumping bin, dropping her pack to tuck herself nearly flat to the ground and peer through the narrow gap between the bin and the factory’s brick wall.
Only a moment later, the Agent appears in the gap between the houses.
He never looks her way, but leans against the side of the shack to dig a pipe out of his pocket and light it.
“You’re very good at disappearing,” he calls.
“It’s just that I’m very good at finding people. Sort of my job, isn’t it?”
Godsdamn.
She steps clear of the bin—it must be filled with discarded fish bits, judging by the smell—with as much dignity as she can muster. “Unless you’ve come with the rest of my pay share, go and find someone else.”
“Alas, my employer’s purse is empty. But maybe you’ll accept an opportunity?”
Sage leans against the alley wall across from the Agent, crossing her arms. “What kind of opportunity?”
“A job.”
“In town?”
The Agent shakes his head. “Decidedly out of town.”
“Another party, then? I’ll pass, but good luck to you. Gaffa will have a hard time finding a ranger willing to travel through winter who hasn’t been contracted and well paid for the trouble already.”
The Agent laughs and puffs his pipe. “It won’t be Gaffa’s problem to solve.
I’ve been hired by a new client. One whose purse is much, much heavier.
And I’m looking for a change in leadership.
I need someone I can trust to get the job done right this time.
I’d bet it was you who located the goods on this last journey, am I correct? ”
She blinks in surprise. Sage never mentioned as much at the Mare’s Milk.
Nobody had. But of course, as the ranger hired to guide them to the caves and keep them fed and sheltered along the way, it was Sage who’d charted a path by the stars to Gaffa’s best guess of a location.
And it was Sage who’d found the caves where frost violets grew at the threshold, promising rarer plants within that thrived in freezing cold…
and, as it turned out, attracted fire beetles.
The Client might be bothered by their late return, and fairly so, but they’ll have no reason to complain about the spell components the party brought back.
The Agent takes her startled silence as confirmation.
“I thought so,” he says with a nod. “In addition to finding people, I’m particularly talented at reading people.
I’m looking for someone reliable, someone capable, and someone hungry.
Someone with the skills and the grit and the ambition to venture out when lesser adventurers are ready to hide under their quilts for the season. Not just a ranger, but a leader.”
To buy herself time to think, Sage plucks the Agent’s pipe from his hand without his offering it up, and takes a long pull that’s sweet, salty, and bitter at once. She tests out the thought, tastes it with the tobacco: Sage Wilderstone, party leader.
She ought to say no.
She’s just come back from one disastrous trip with little to show for it.
Her knee could do with a rest, loath as she is to admit it (and she certainly won’t be admitting it aloud).
Besides, the weather will only worsen as the days shorten.
No, she should stick to the plan she made when she left the tavern.
Find local work until the ice melts in spring, then hire herself out for another expedition as soon as possible.
Another client, another agent, another party leader.
A competent one this time, gods willing.
And yet…
“Where exactly would I be leading a party?”
He fixes Sage in his gaze. “The Northlands.”
“You aren’t serious!”
“To the Graywood, more precisely.”