Simon sat down on the indicated cushion, crossing his legs with an awkwardness he tried to mask with a polite smile. The veiled figure — the Hermit, he realized looking more closely, noticing the symbols engraved on the clay tablet and the way the sand-colored tunic was tied in a style he'd already glimpsed, in passing, in Corin's stories — resumed speaking with the human, voice low and solemn, almost ceremonial in its rhythm, every word pronounced with the care of someone treating language itself as something sacred not to be wasted on idle chatter.
The human nodded at what the Hermit had just said, closing the ledger in front of him for a moment, as if Simon's sudden presence had made it necessary to temporarily suspend any further discussion of the shipment terms. His gaze moved to Simon with the same professional curiosity shown earlier, sizing him up in silence while waiting to see how the situation would develop before intervening again.
"Are you sure this isn't a spy?" the Hermit said, without looking away from Simon, the tone carrying the weight of someone who weighs every word before speaking it, as if language itself were a precious resource not to be wasted.
Simon, caught off guard by the direct question, immediately raised his hands. "If you'd rather I leave, I can leave," he said, in a conciliatory tone, desperately trying not to worsen a situation that already seemed to have slipped out of control faster than he'd have liked. "Seriously, no problem. I was just passing through, literally — they practically pushed me into this tent."
The Hermit turned sharply toward him, dark eyes narrowing above the veil. "How do you know the desert language?" he asked, voice even lower, loaded with a suspicion he made no effort to hide.
Simon was taken aback, the question circling in his head without finding an immediate answer. For him, there simply was no perceptible difference between one language and another — everything sounded the same, everything meant exactly what it meant, without his brain ever registering the exact moment a conversation shifted from one dialect to another. He had no idea when they'd been speaking Common, or the desert language, or anything else. For him it was simply... talking.
"I... I couldn't tell you exactly," he said, honestly confused. "For me it's all the same, in a way."
The Hermit didn't seem at all reassured by that answer. If anything, his suspicion seemed to solidify further, his eyes darting quickly from the human to the table, as if recalculating every single word exchanged so far in light of this new, unsettling variable. He turned to the human emissary, his voice dropping even lower, as if weighing a concrete threat instead of an awkward stranger who'd wandered in by chance. "It's not chance," he said, voice turning sharp, "that a man walks into a tent during a private negotiation, and happens to know the desert language well enough to understand every word spoken in here. In my clan, someone who shows up like this without warning is interrogated before being let go, not dismissed with a smile."
The human emissary, who until then had watched the scene with a mix of professional caution and mild amusement, raised a hand in a placating gesture. "Easy, Yusuf," he said, addressing the Hermit. "I don't think this young man is here to spy on anyone. He just has the look of someone who got lost in the most crowded market Cajin has to offer this time of year."
Simon felt the tension rise in the small tent despite the peacemaking intervention, and tried the only route he could think of to defuse it further — a joke, tossed out as lightly as possible.
"Honestly," he said, "the problem is I know all of them. Not just this one. It's a strange flaw I carry around, I really can't explain it any better than that."
There was a moment of silence, the Hermit staring at him with an unreadable expression behind the veil, before a warm, amused female voice came from behind a fabric panel at the back of the tent.
"It's impossible to know them all," the voice said, an instant before the panel parted, revealing a woman with tanned, sun-weathered skin, dressed in light desert clothes despite being right in the middle of Cajin, a waterskin hanging from her belt visibly fuller than she'd need for herself alone — as if she always carried a little extra to share, out of habit more than necessity. Her hair was gathered in a simple, practical braid, and the way she moved in the tent's cramped space betrayed an old familiarity with this kind of negotiation, as if she'd grown up in it.
Yusuf — because it had to be him, Simon realized from how the emissary had addressed the Hermit earlier — turned to the newcomer with a respectful nod, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly at her presence.
"Petra," he said, almost as a formal greeting. "I wasn't expecting you so soon."
"I heard the voice rising from out here," she said, with a half smile, her eyes now settling on Simon with curious, appraising attention, but without the suspicion that had animated Yusuf a moment before. She sat down beside him without asking permission, with the naturalness of someone used to moving through that space as if it were her own home, a small nod of greeting also directed at the human emissary, whom she seemed to know well.
"Test me, if you don't trust me," Simon said, addressing her, with a smile that tried to stay confident despite everything, encouraged by the newcomer's less hostile tone.
Petra looked him over with fresh attention, one eyebrow rising slightly, almost accepting the implicit challenge in those words. Then she said something, quickly, in a melodic, drawling dialect, the vowels seeming to stretch and blend together in a way completely different from any other language Simon had heard so far — and yet he understood it perfectly, and answered without the slightest effort, almost automatically, the words leaving his mouth before his brain even consciously registered having formed them.
Petra's smile widened, genuinely surprised now, her eyes flicking briefly toward Yusuf as if to share that astonishment with someone who could truly appreciate its scope. "So you also know the tight dialect of Miramare," she said, switching back to Common in a tone that betrayed renewed respect. "Congratulations, really. It's not often you find someone capable of that much, among humans — actually, I'd never encountered it at all, if I'm being fully honest."
Yusuf stayed silent, watching Simon with an expression that had shifted from open suspicion to something closer to thoughtful caution, as if he still didn't quite know what to make of this unexpected information, but was no longer ready to consider him an immediate threat to be sent away without more questions.
It was right at that moment, as Simon was about to reply with another quip to keep riding that small unexpected wave of triumph, that a familiar voice rang out from outside the tent, growing closer, growing more alarmed.
"Simon! Simon!"
Corin.
Simon shot up, nearly knocking over the cushion he'd been sitting on, his heart tightening slightly at the thought of how much time must have passed without his noticing. "I have to go, they're calling me," he said quickly, addressing all three with a bow so deep it nearly brushed his forehead against the rug, an exaggerated gesture he hoped conveyed respect more than pure embarrassment — a leftover, maybe, from the little he vaguely remembered about formal manners, applied quite roughly to a situation he had no idea how to handle otherwise. "Sorry again for the intrusion, and... thanks for the conversation, I suppose. It was instructive, in a way I'll probably understand better later."
Yusuf watched him leave with a still-unreadable expression, but made no move to stop him, his initial suspicion diluted enough by now to leave room for silent curiosity rather than open hostility.
Petra laughed, a light sound, and gave him a wave, followed by a knowing wink that caught Simon completely off guard. "Who do you serve, Simon?" she asked, as he hurried toward the tent's exit, the question carrying a specific weight, almost as if the answer really mattered to her.
"A guild," he said, without stopping, his hand already on the fabric flap that served as a door. "I'm... in a guild. Explorers, if that helps define me better."
"Goodbye, Simon of a guild," Petra said, her voice following him out of the tent along with a soft laugh, while the Hermit remained silent, still visibly puzzled by everything that had just happened in the span of a few concentrated minutes in that small tent scented with spices and desert dust.
Corin saw him emerge from the tent with an expression somewhere between relief and exasperation, quickly closing the distance between them to grab him by the elbow with a grip that betrayed more accumulated worry than she wanted to openly admit.
"Where the hell did you disappear to?" she asked, her eyes scanning him head to toe as if to make sure he was really all in one piece, her fingers gripping his arm as if afraid he might dissolve back into the crowd at any moment. "I looked for you everywhere, I walked around the same block three times, I was sure you'd gotten lost forever in this maze or that someone had robbed you and left you in an alley."
Simon ran a hand through his hair, still a bit shaken by the whole ordeal, his gaze drifting for an instant back toward the tent now behind him. "Honestly I don't quite understand what happened in there, or exactly who I talked to," he said, his voice still betraying a residue of genuine confusion, mixed with something that vaguely resembled the euphoria of someone who's just lived through a surreal moment without having the tools to fully process it. "There was a Hermit who suspected me of being a spy, a man who seemed to work for someone important, and then a woman came out from behind an inner curtain and gave me some kind of language test that apparently I passed without even realizing it. But thanks for saving me, anyway."
Corin looked at him, thrown off, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion that mirrored his own. "Saved you from what? I didn't do anything at all, I just called you because you'd gotten lost. I didn't even know you'd ended up in a tent with strangers interrogating you."
"Yeah, exactly," Simon said, without elaborating further, still too confused himself to be able to sensibly explain what had just happened — a suspected spy, a language test passed without even knowing he'd taken it, and a Cajin advisor who now knew him, however vaguely, as "Simon of a guild." "Let's just say your timing was perfect, even if you didn't know what you were interrupting."
Corin shook her head, evidently deciding it wasn't worth pressing further on a mystery she currently had neither the time nor the patience to dig into fully, especially with her arms already full of packages and bags of every shape and size. "Anyway," she said, abruptly changing the subject with her characteristic practical enthusiasm, visibly lifting her arms full of purchases as tangible proof of how much time she'd actually spent looking for him, "I bought a bunch of stuff while I was searching for you, to kill time and anxiety together. You need to try everything on right away, before we head back to the inn — if something doesn't fit, better find out now while the shops are still open and we can exchange it."
"How much did you buy, exactly?" Simon asked, looking with a mix of curiosity and apprehension at the quantity of packages she was carrying, trying to count them at a glance without quite managing it.
"Enough to make you look like a real guild member, and not a lost tourist anymore," Corin said, already heading toward the next shop with a determined stride that left no room for further discussion. "Move it. The good light for checking sizes doesn't last forever, and I'm not coming back here tomorrow just because you got distracted again."
She dragged him off, once more, through the crowded market, leaving behind the tent and the three negotiators inside it — and Simon, however much he kept mulling over what had just happened, couldn't help but smile to himself, thinking that "Simon of a guild" wasn't, all things considered, such a terrible way to be remembered by someone who really mattered in this city. Maybe, he thought, it was even a small step up from "confused human just off a ship" — the title he seemed to have earned in every other encounter he'd had so far.