"Yorin!" Corin exclaimed, with an enthusiasm that struck Simon as almost theatrical, as if she were putting it on for show. "I've got something incredible for you today. Something that'll make you happy for a whole week."
Yorin didn't so much as flinch. He set the cigar down in a small chipped copper ashtray, unhurried, and pointed with a curt gesture at the workbench in front of him. "Put it on the table," he said, in the same practical, utterly unenthused tone with which, Simon imagined, he must greet every single promise of "something incredible" brought to him over the course of a working day.
Corin stepped up to the bench and, with an almost ceremonial gesture, pulled a small object wrapped in dark cloth out of a leather bag hanging at her hip. She set it down gently on the worn wood of the counter and pulled the cloth aside with two fingers.
Simon leaned in slightly to get a better look. It was a small seal — no bigger than a large coin, but thick, heavy-looking — forged from a dark metal that caught the lantern light with an almost oily sheen, more like polished obsidian than ordinary iron. On the upper face a winding "S" was engraved, elegant almost to excess, bordered by small filigree patterns that seemed to twist around themselves like metal vines. A small pass-through ring, forged with the same care, allowed it to be hung from a chain or a cord.
It didn't look like an ordinary object. It looked like something made by someone who never settled for the bare minimum.
Yorin bent over the bench, adjusted the monocle more firmly over his eye with a small tilt of his head, and with his other hand passed his open palm slowly over the object, without touching it. A faint amber glow lit up under his fingers, sliding back and forth as if he were reading something written in an invisible language — not too different, Simon thought, from a scanner at a supermarket passing over a barcode, only slower, more deliberate.
The silence that followed lasted only a couple of seconds, but to Simon it felt much longer, thick with an anticipation neither Corin nor Yorin seemed in any hurry to break.
"So," Corin said at last, crossing her arms. "Your Rune Reading. What does it say?"
Yorin didn't answer right away. Instead he took a small sheet of paper from a drawer in the bench, dipped a pen in a dark inkwell, and wrote something in a few quick, confident strokes. Then he turned the sheet and slid it toward Corin.
"That's my offer," he said, simply.
Corin looked down at the sheet. For an instant — just an instant, but Simon caught it perfectly, because right then he wasn't looking at anything but her — something crossed her face. A small jolt, almost imperceptible, made her chair scrape a couple of inches backward on the wooden floor. She recovered immediately, with a polite little cough and her back snapping straight, and said, in a tone that wanted to sound detached and didn't quite manage it:
"Two Aureus... seems acceptable."
Simon, sitting a little further back on a stool nobody had formally offered him but that he'd taken anyway, thought of only one thing: if poker existed in this world, this woman would lose her shirt in ten minutes.
He'd always played cards with friends, back before — years ago now, in another life that seemed to belong to someone else — and had even enjoyed, for a while, watching videos on how to read opponents' tells: eyes that shift, hands that stiffen, the way someone breathes differently when they're holding something good. There'd even been that TV show, the one with the detective who could tell if someone was lying just from the way their lips moved before they spoke — he'd watched half a season of it with Giulia, a while back, before that too became one of the thousand things they no longer did together.
But it didn't take a TV detective to see that this stocky little man with the monocle was pulling off an enormous swindle right under Corin's nose. One second of looking at her face was enough.
Before Corin could accept, before the word could even fully leave her mouth, Simon leaned forward on the stool.
"Three of that thing you said before," he said, in a flat, almost bored tone, as if he were simply correcting an obvious math error.
Corin spun around, her eyes shooting him a glare intense enough to make anyone else take a step back — but then, a moment later, her gaze slid toward Yorin, and Simon saw something change in her expression. Yorin hadn't gotten angry at the interruption at all. He hadn't even blinked. He just sat there, the monocle glinting faintly, with the patient look of someone who's seen enough negotiations not to be rattled by some unknown human raising his voice.
"Where I'm from," Simon went on, feeling every eye in the room on him but deciding, for once, not to let it intimidate him, "when someone appraises an object and then names a price without ever saying what the hell the object actually is, that usually means they're hiding how much it's really worth."
The silence that followed was different from before. More tense, more charged.
And it was in that moment that Corin changed.
It wasn't a dramatic shift — no exclamation, no sharp gesture — but Simon saw it anyway, in the posture that snapped straight, in the gaze that refocused with a cutting precision she hadn't shown all through the negotiation. He'd misread her, he realized in that instant. Corin was nowhere near naive — that number on the paper had simply caught her off guard, enough that she'd nearly accepted on instinct, before the rational part of her brain could take back control.
"It's just a runic seal..." Yorin tried to say, but he didn't finish the sentence.
"You're lying," Corin said, flat, without a trace of hesitation. "Remember I'm half-elf, Yorin. You can't try to cheat me."
Her eyes lit up — the same flickering golden glow Simon had seen in the half-orc's eyes the night before, except this time it was her producing it, and the sensation that ran across his skin was nearly identical: that thickness in the air, that light, invisible pressure.
Yorin sighed, a deep sound that seemed to come from somewhere below his chest. He took the cigar out of his mouth, set it back in the ashtray, and for the first time since they'd walked in, abandoned the pragmatic, detached tone completely.
"It's a Seal of Silas," he said, surrendering. "It opens any lock not protected by a superior rune. And whoever forged it paid an almost obsessive amount of attention to the aesthetics to be just some rush job — look at the filigree, look at how it winds around the letter. It's a signed piece, even if no one would ever openly admit it." He paused, as if every word physically cost him something. "So yes. Two Aureus and twenty Shields is a fair price."
Corin, though, had already snapped back into perfect focus — no lingering trace of her earlier shock.
"Two Aureus, twenty Shields," she said, her voice firm, almost counting on her fingers as she spoke, "and a mid-size Enchanted Waterskin."
"That's practically double what I offered!" Yorin exclaimed, throwing his hands up in a theatrical protest, the monocle nearly falling out of his eye from the sheer emphasis.
"Take it or leave it," Corin said, entirely unfazed, crossing her arms again with the air of someone who's already won and is just waiting for the other side to realize it. "I know perfectly well you can resell that seal to Renn — or to one of his contacts in Cajin — for at least double what we're discussing here. So I'd say it works out for both of us, no?"
Yorin stared at her for a long moment, his chest rising in another heavy sigh, before extending a stubby hand toward her. "Fine," he muttered. "Deal. You're a hyena, Ashvale, you know that?"
"I get told that a lot," Corin replied, with a smile that finally reached her eyes, as she shook that calloused hand with her own.
They left the shop a few minutes later, a small pouch of coins jingling faintly at Corin's belt and an Enchanted Waterskin hanging from her bag. The afternoon light, filtering through the crooked buildings of the Hearth, seemed warmer than Simon remembered it being when they'd walked in.
They walked in silence for a couple of minutes before Corin turned to him.
"Thanks," she said, simply. No further explanation, no particular emphasis — just that one word, said with a sincerity that stood out against the rest of her cocky behavior a moment earlier.
Simon shrugged, a little uneasy at that direct thanks, not used to receiving genuine ones so easily. "Being around you is helping me figure out where the hell I've ended up," he said, half serious and half not. "And anyway it was obvious that little bastard dwarf was trying to screw you over."
Corin chuckled, a light sound that shook her shoulders for a second. "Only because he was half-human," she said. "A pure dwarf would've insisted on paying you in bullion, not Crowns — and with bullion we would've come out even further ahead, at the right exchange rate. But for us hybrids, dealing off the island with the pure races is always a bit harder. Everyone tries to take us for a ride, hoping we don't know their rules well enough to defend ourselves."
She said it lightly, almost in passing, but Simon caught it all the same, beneath that easy tone, the same older and harder shadow he'd already glimpsed the night before, climbing the stairs of the inn — something that wasn't quite a complaint, but wasn't a simple, neutral observation about the world either.
He said nothing about it. Not yet. He just kept walking beside her, along the narrow streets of the Hearth, one small step closer to understanding — not the whole world, not yet, but at least the woman who, for some reason he still couldn't quite explain to himself, had decided to keep him with her instead of letting him drown alone in all this chaos.