Chapter 67
Price of Fairy Dust
Wyona sat on her bedroll, her green hair pulled over one shoulder; she looked at me as I entered her tent.
"You sure took your time," she said.
"Turns out finding clean water is hard when half the supply got crushed by a giant three-headed monkey."
"A trivial concern." She accepted the flask without thanking me and drank deeply. "I've been thinking about our arrangement."
"The one where I keep you alive and—"
"And I pay you. Yes, that particular arrangement." She set the waterskin down. "But payment alone is insufficient motivation for a man of your… particular appetites."
"I just want to get to Valdris in one piece. Same as you."
"Insufficient." She said, studying me for a moment.
"What do you want, Wyona?"
"I want to know what you're after. And in exchange…" She tilted her head with a bird-like tilt. "I'll teach you something worth more than anything in that treasury you're chasing."
That got my attention, making the little hairs on my forearms stand up.
"I'm not chasing any treasury… I don’t know what you are talking about."
"Of course not." She said with a devilish smile.
"But when you arrive in Valdris, you'll need to sell whatever you've stolen.
You'll need to buy supplies, acquire contacts, and move through a city controlled by the Golden Rose, the Covenant, and three Jarl factions who would each love to gut the other two.
You'll need to do all of this without being noticed, without being cheated, and without ending up in a cell. " She paused. "Or worse."
"And you can teach me that."
"My little rabble boy, I am that. I was making connections before I could see over the counter." She twirled her green hair between her fingers.
I chewed on that for a minute. Cedric's memories gave me fragments of the city, the Covenant's internal workings. But Cedric had been a soldier, and he'd known how to kill things, but sadly he hadn't known shit about commerce. And lucky for me, Wyona did.
"I'll think about it."
"You'll accept," she said. "Because you're smart enough to know a good deal when it sits across from you."
◆◆◆
The lessons started the next day. While Wyona walked beside me at the front of the caravan, and nobody had the nerve to contest.
"The first rule of commerce," Wyona said, "is that price is nothing but fairy dust."
"Everything's got a price."
"Everything has a cost. Price is what someone convinces you the cost is.
" She picked up a stone from the road and held it between two fingers.
"This stone costs nothing. But if I tell you it fell from mountains where the Star Saints trained, and that holding it grants clarity of mind…
" She turned it in the light. "Now it has a price…
your perceptive value of this stone has changed. "
I took the stone from her and turned it over. "So everything's a con."
"A con is a negotiation where only one party knows the terms." She took the stone back. "Your job is to create the terms that dictate that negotiation."
She was sharper than I'd expected. And what kept catching me off guard was how good a teacher she was. Patient in a way that contradicted everything else about her personality. When I got something wrong, she didn't mock me for it… she just corrected me and moved on.
◆◆◆
At night, after the camp settled, Zo and I trained.
Tonight, we were working on her recovery speed.
She'd take a hit from my worm-hardened forearm, absorb the force, and try to redirect it into a counterstrike within two seconds.
She was getting faster. The veins along her arms lit blue-green when she stored energy, and the discharge burst out as speed that turned her axe into a blur.
"Again," she said, rolling her shoulder.
I swung once more. She caught it on the flat of the axe; the impact traveled through the steel and into her body. Her veins flared as she pivoted and drove the axe handle into my belly hard enough to send acidic bile into my mouth. I swallowed it back down.
"Good…" I said as I held my bruised abdomen. I guided my worms towards the injury, and they healed it on the spot.
She planted the axe and leaned on it, breathing hard. "So. You gonna tell me what you and the princess talk about all day?"
I'd been waiting for this. "Jealous?"
She spat on the floor and glared at me.
"She's teaching me how Valdris works. The markets, the merchants, the political shit. Stuff we need to know if we're going to—"
"She's not our friend, Fish. She ain’t one of us… she is just a tool."
"Is she? I'm not getting attached," I said.
But the truth was more complicated than what I'd told Zo, and I knew it even as the words left my mouth.
She picked up her axe, spat once more, and threw it at my head.
"Again."
◆◆◆
A woman and her children, survivors from the passenger wagons, had interrupted our lesson.
One of her younger kids had a pretty nasty cough, and she’d pleaded with Wyona for a few minutes.
Wyona ended up calling one of her newly hired attendants over, and a few minutes later, the attendant brought the woman a wool blanket and a jar of something that looked like honey, with whole cloves of garlic floating inside.
"Cough syrup," Wyona said when she saw I was looking at her. "From my personal supply. A ridiculous waste, really. The child will recover on her own."
"Sure, sure," I said, waving my hand.
"Don't read into it, commoner. I simply cannot stand the sound of coughing. It disrupts my concentration."
"You have a talent for this," she said.
"Must be all the practice stealing from caravans."
She didn't laugh. She just looked at me with her green eyes and said, "Don't waste it."