I poured the tea.
We were not,as it turned out, quick to leave.
There was the tea, which Sammy drank slowly, sitting cross-legged on the blanket with both hands wrapped around the cup. Then breakfast, comprising bread and soft cheese from the canvas pack, was received with her renewed and deeply resigned appreciation. Then Berry, who had opinions about the order in which the bags should be repacked and expressed them at length.
By the time we were properly ready, the morning had moved along without us.
Sammy stood at the spring’s edge and looked back at it once. After a breath, she turned toward the road and started pulling her hair into its tie, fingers quick and practiced. I was watching her and not pretending otherwise.
“You’re staring,” she said without turning around.
“I’m admiring.”
She finished the tie and spun, one eyebrow raised. “Is there a difference?”
“Staring implies I intend to stop at some point.” I shouldered the canvas pack and then her bag onto my back. “I do not.”
The color that rose to her cheeks was worth all the treasures in Havenlore. She opened her mouth, closed it, pointed at me with her pen — where she had produced it from, I genuinely could not say — and turned back to the road.
“Insufferable,” she said. But a smile played on her lips.
Berry sailed from their rock to my shoulder with an air of great purposefulness, as if they had been waiting for us to finish and had decided we had used up our allocated time.
“Market today,” Sammy said, notebook already open as we walked. A page dense with planning notes, descriptions, questions, her friends’ names listed in her cramped, precise hand. She had been building the list since before we left home. “I have a system.”
Glancing over her shoulder, I agreed, “I know you have a system.”
“Eastern stalls first since that’s our direction, then work back toward the center, then?—“
“Sammy.”
She looked up.
“I carry the bags,” I said. “You work your system. We will cover more ground that way.”
She stared at me. Then the pen came up again. “I see. Youarean excellent planner.”
I smiled and fell into step beside her, watching the trees without appearing to, and watching her with no pretense of doing otherwise.
Berry’s tail pressed lightly against my neck as we walked.Pay attention,they said without words.
Always.
Sammy
The path curved through a last stand of trees, and then the canopy simply ended, opening onto a flat crossroads where four paths met at a packed-earth square easily three times the size of Havenlore’s town center. The smell hit my nose: roasted nuts, spiced meat, something sweet and floral I couldn’t name, woodsmoke from a dozen different fires, and underneath all of it the earthy scents of a lot of different species gathered in one place.
From every direction, we could see it. The market was alive.
Stalls crowded every edge of the square in cheerful disorder, their canopies in a rainbow of colors, their proprietors ranging in size from a gnome barely reaching my knee to a broad-shouldered creature with a neck like a tree trunk who appeared to be selling large hats. Customers of a dozen species moved between the stalls in overlapping currents. A group of fae children chased something small and fast around the fountain at the square’s center. A pair of elderly naga coiled companionably on a wide bench, sharing something wrapped in leaves. Somewhere deep in the market, someone was playing aninstrument I had no name for. A high and silvery note wove through the noise like a thread.
“Oh,” I breathed.
“The crossroads market,” Guruk said simply beside me. “It runs on the third day of every week. Traders come from the settlements in all four directions.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Not often. But a handful of times for lumber negotiations.” He scanned the square. “It is larger than I remembered. Perhaps, it has grown.”
