Tim's POV
The money was a problem I needed to solve carefully.
Fourteen gold coins and twelve silver sitting in a rat hole in the wall of an orphanage was not a stable situation. Not because anyone was likely to find it, I had chosen the spot well, and children were not generally suspected of hoarding significant wealth, but because money that couldn't be used was just metal. The point of resources was to convert them into other resources. Capital into capability. That was basic.
The question was how to spend it without creating questions I couldn't answer.
A five year old orphan walking into a merchant's shop and dropping gold coins on a counter would generate exactly the kind of attention I had spent months carefully avoiding. Even silver would raise eyebrows. The lower ward operated in copper. A child from St. Linel's orphanage spending silver was a story that would travel, and stories had a way of finding ears they weren't meant for.
I needed a proxy.
I lay awake the night after the alley, running options. A middleman, someone who would conduct the transaction visibly while I remained invisible.
Someone with no connection to me, no reason to wonder about my motives.
The city had no shortage of candidates.
The old clothes cost eight copper from a rag-seller near the south market, a coat, a pair of trousers, worn but not destroyed, the kind of thing a man fallen on moderate hard times might wear. Not fine enough to attract notice, not so ragged as to be obviously charity. I paid in copper from the two coins the kind woman had given me months ago, which meant the purchase left no trace back to my hidden cache.
I found him two streets from the orphanage, in the doorway I had passed dozens of times without engaging. Old, white-bearded. He smelled of cheap wine and woodsmoke and the city's general misery. His eyes, when they opened to look at me, were not stupid. That was important. I needed someone who could follow instructions, not someone so far gone they'd lose the thread.
"I have a proposition," I said, crouching to his level, keeping my voice low and conversational. "It involves a simple errand, and a gold coin at the end."
He looked at me for a long moment. Looked at the folded clothes I was holding. Looked back at me.
"Aren't you a street kid.?," he said. His voice was rough but the words were clear.
"I'm someone offering you a gold coin for an hour of your time," I said. "That's all you need to know about me."
Another long pause. Then, slowly, he sat up straighter.
"What's the errand?"
His name, he told me while he changed into the clothes behind a wall, was Holgol. He didn't volunteer more than that and I didn't ask. Names were enough. The coat fit him reasonably well, he was thinner than it was made for, but that was fine, it just looked like a man in slightly too-large clothes, which was unremarkable.
I explained the errand twice, slowly, making sure each element was understood. He listened without interrupting, which I appreciated.
"The education office on Merchant's Lane," I said. "You want a teacher for the children of St. Linel's orphanage. Three months of instruction, reading and writing. You pay whatever they ask, within reason. You give your name as Holgol. You do not mention me.
You do not mention where the money came from. You are a charitable citizen doing a good deed. Can you do this?"
"But why?" he asked.
"Does the gold coin not answer that question sufficiently?"
He thought about it. "It does," he said.
I gave him ten silver coins for the payment, enough to cover whatever the service cost with room to spare, the remainder being his to keep as additional compensation for his trouble. I had calculated the approximate cost of private tutoring from fragments of conversation I'd absorbed around the city. Eight to ten silver for a three-month engagement seemed right for this district.
I sent him off and took up a position across the street from the education office, far enough to be inconspicuous, close enough to observe.
He was good, I was relieved to discover. He walked with appropriate purpose, not overdoing it, not the theatrical uprightness of someone performing normality, just a man walking to an appointment. He went inside. I waited.
He emerged eighteen minutes later.
I followed him to the alley we'd agreed on. He turned when he heard my step and reported: eight silver coins, three months, teacher to begin tomorrow morning, receipt stamped and filed.
I gave him the gold coin. Told him the two remaining silver were his.
He looked at the gold coin in his palm for a moment with an expression I recognised, not greed, not excitement, but a complicated relief , was he worried, that i would have done something to him, i am just 5 years old.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it plainly.
He nodded once, pocketed the coin, and walked away without looking back.
I watched him go and hoped, in the vague way that I allowed myself to hope things that were outside my control, that we will NEVER meet each other ever again. Then I went back to the orphanage and waited for tomorrow.
The teacher's name was Maren, a woman of perhaps forty, thin and precise, with ink-stained fingers and the patient exhaustion of someone who wasn't a morning person, She arrived mid-morning, while Sister Edna was doing the breakfast dishes, and introduced herself with the stamped receipt from the education office.
Sister Edna's confusion was visible from across the room. I watched from my usual spot, the one that gave me sightlines to the main room.
"An old man named Holgol arranged it," Maren said, producing the receipt. "Paid in full. Three months."
Sister Edna turned the paper over in her hands as if looking for the trick in it. Finding none, she did what practical people do when presented with unexpected good fortune and sufficient official documentation, she accepted it, set the paper on her desk, and told Maren where she could set up.
The children were assembled with the particular chaotic energy of small people being asked to do something unfamiliar. They sat on the floor of the common room in a rough cluster, looking at Maren with expressions ranging from bordom to mild interest.
I sat with them. This was important, I had to appear to be learning at the same rate they were. I don't know how to read. In my previous life I had read thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of pages of text in a script that obviously bore no relation to whatever alphabet this world used. But that previous literacy was irrelevant. What mattered was the literacy of this world, the written form was something I had only seen in fragments. Shop signs. The stamped papers Sister Edna kept in her desk. The guild notice boards I passed on my rounds.
I was genuinely learning. Just faster than the others, which I would need to carefully conceal.
Maren turned out to be an excellent teacher, methodical without being boring, patient with the slowest children, quick to move on when a concept had landed. She had clearly done this before, in exactly this context, with exactly this demographic.
Three months passed in a rhythm I found unexpectedly pleasant.
The morning lessons became the fixed point of my day, the thing I organised everything else around. My vermin-clearing circuits shrank as the available population continued to decline, and I filled the time instead with practice, copying letters onto flat stones with a piece of chalk I'd found, sounding out the words on signs as I walked, running the written forms of vocabulary I knew through my head until they became automatic.
By the end of the first month I could read simple texts. By the end of the second I was reading the guild notice board in full each time I passed it, processing requests, absorbing the language of commerce and danger assessment and reward structures. By the end of the third month I was reading as fluently as any adult in the higher ward, which was not saying a great deal by my previous world's standards, but in this world, in this district, was an enormous and quiet advantage.
The other children made slower but genuine progress. Mara, who had been watching my hygiene habits and quietly copying them for over a year, threw herself into literacy with a determination that surprised even Maren. Two of the younger boys struggled but finished the three months able to write their own names and read basic signage.
Sister Edna watched all of this with her usual expression of calibrated reserve. But I caught her, once, watching Mara sound out a sentence from the simple reader Maren had brought, and the expression that crossed her face was not reserve at all.
On the last day, Maren collected her materials and said her goodbyes with the efficient warmth of a professional concluding a contract. At the door she paused and looked back at the room, at the children who were already using their new skill, arguing over who got to read the label on the grain sack.
"Whoever Holgol is," Maren said to Sister Edna quietly, "he spent his money well."
She left.
Tim's stats ( he can't see his stats)
level: [5]
vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]