"This is just — unbelievable," Benedict said, staring at the hydrangeas.
I stared at them too, with considerably more internal alarm than he could see on my face.
The plants I had put in the ground yesterday had been fine specimens — healthy, a few blooms here and there, the kind of thing that would have looked perfectly presentable flanking a stall entrance. Nothing remarkable. Yesterday's work had been neat and careful, and I had been satisfied with it.
What was in the ground this morning was something else entirely.
The plants had exploded. Every stem was dense with leaves, the growth full and layered in a way that normally required months rather than hours. And the blooms — dozens of them, in every colour I had planted, open and vivid and completely indifferent to the fact that they had been in the ground for less than a day.
The knowledge had been there, somewhere in the deep pool of everything Aiona's consciousness had left behind: 'Dragon magic is particularly nurturing to living things.' I had read the words and filed them away without fully absorbing what they would mean in practice.
Now I understand.
"Did you put some kind of growth potion in there, lad?" Benedict turned to me with the genuine puzzlement of a man who has seen a great deal and is genuinely unsure how to categorise this. "How does something grow like that overnight?"
I opened my mouth, found nothing useful waiting there, and closed it again.
"I genuinely have no idea," I said, and shrugged, with every appearance of someone equally mystified by the situation. 'Yes. Completely baffling. Nothing to do with me whatsoever.'
"Why are you both standing outside?"
Reichert appeared in the stall entrance with his daytime composure fully reinstated — precise, cool, and carrying none of the looseness that had characterised the previous evening. The man who had leaned his head on my shoulder and announced, with great solemnity, that he also couldn't hold his alcohol was nowhere in evidence. I missed him, slightly. I wasn't going to examine that.
His interruption, however, was genuinely useful — it gave me the momentum to herd both myself and Benedict back inside and away from the hydrangeas before the questions could develop further.
I thought we were safe.
I was wrong.
Reichert didn't follow us in. I glanced back from just inside the entrance and found him still standing at the threshold, his attention no longer on us but on the flowers. He was looking at them with a particular quality of focus — narrowed eyes, head slightly tilted, the expression of someone who is not confused but is instead working through a specific analysis.
He was a sorcerer. His senses, where magic was concerned, were not ordinary.
I moved quickly.
"Any instructions for today?" I asked, appearing at his shoulder with a speed that was slightly more breathless than the distance warranted.
He turned away from the hydrangeas immediately. His gaze settled on me with a brief, assessing quality that I worked very hard to receive with complete blandness.
"You and I will finish the exterior decoration," he said, after a moment that lasted slightly longer than I would have preferred. "The others can complete the interior. I want to finish early enough that everyone gets some rest before the fair opens tomorrow — once it does, there won't be much opportunity." He let out a short breath. "Go tell them."
I went.
---
The vision he had for the exterior was ambitious. Eight fire posts — four on each side flanking the stall, positioned to illuminate the display at night without casting shadows across the merchandise. Customers should be able to see the jewellery clearly regardless of the hour, which meant the light needed to be warm, positioned correctly, and completely free of obstruction.
The bureau had supplied most of the building materials for the stalls, but with a price attached to everything, and the morning traffic of merchants completing their last-minute finishing touches had made the materials officer comprehensively busy by the time we arrived.
He noticed Reichert before we reached him.
The visible sequence of reactions was interesting to observe: recognition, immediately followed by a pallor that moved across the man's face with the speed of something involuntary, followed by the particular kind of forced composure that people adopt when they would very much like to be somewhere else but have no way to get there.
"Mister Reichert," he said, in a voice that was working hard to sound neutral. "Good to see you again." A slightly longer pause than the words required. "I should tell you upfront — the prices listed are final. No exceptions. No negotiation. Final."
He said it with the tone of a man reciting a prepared statement he has reason to believe will be immediately ignored.
"Of course," Reichert said pleasantly. "I'd like to look at your lumber options. Fire post construction, and wood for burning. Could you show me what you have?"
The officer led us into the supply hut — a large structure that had clearly been assembled by combining several smaller ones, every available wall and floor space occupied by building materials of various kinds. He stopped beside a stack of timber that reached almost to the ceiling and launched into an explanation of grain, durability, and fire resistance with the efficient enthusiasm of someone who knows their stock well and is hoping that competence will be sufficient defence against whatever is coming.
Reichert examined the timber in silence. He ran his hand along the grain, checked the end cuts, considered the stacking. Then he asked the price.
The officer gave him a number.
What followed was genuinely difficult to summarise.
I had encountered haggling before, in markets and commercial districts across two kingdoms. I thought I understood the basic shape of it. I did not understand the 'art' of it — the specific, sustained, entirely shameless form that Reichert now deployed, which bore approximately the same relationship to ordinary bargaining that a master swordsman bears to someone who has been handed a sword for the first time.
He was extraordinary. He raised objections I would never have thought to raise. He referenced comparable prices in ports I had not heard of. He expressed sincere, measured disappointment at specific intervals. He praised the quality of the timber in terms that somehow simultaneously implied he was doing the officer a favour by considering it. At one point the officer threw up his hands. At another point I was fairly certain he was close to tears.
When we left with our loaded cart, the three-digit price had become two, and the officer was staring after us with the expression of a man trying to work out exactly what had just happened to him.
I pulled the cart along the path back toward the stall and looked at the broad back of the man walking ahead of me.
He had haggled a non-negotiable price down by a third, with the focused efficiency of someone doing something they are very good at and find completely unremarkable. The last thing I would have predicted from the silver-haired guild master who carried himself like someone accustomed to being the most striking person in any room was that he also haggled like someone's particularly determined grandmother.
A smile settled on my face before I could prevent it.
---
We began the fire posts as soon as we returned.
The work divided itself naturally. Reichert took on the structural preparation — digging the holes for the posts, a task that required precision in terms of depth and angle if the posts were to hold steady under the weight of a metal fire basin and a night's worth of burning. I took the wood.
The axe was a new acquaintance. I had never used one before, and the first few swings were a negotiation between me and the tool as I found the right angle and rhythm. Within a short while, though, something in the repetition settled into a groove, and I began to understand why people found this work satisfying. There was something direct about it — the clean split of wood along the grain, the physical logic of each stroke, the small specific pleasure of doing a simple thing correctly and watching it work.
The morning air was still relatively cool. The fair grounds were busy around us — the sounds of other guilds completing their own preparations, voices in various languages, the occasional clatter of something being moved. Somewhere nearby, someone was arguing cheerfully about the placement of a banner.
I split another log and stacked the pieces, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I was entirely content.