The clothier won, and it wasn't close.
Tomorrow morning was a keep, a captain, and a registration window that opened at first light, and somewhere between the reflection and the last crust I had accepted the arithmetic: I could not walk into a soldier's morning wearing a shirt that had lost an argument with a sergeant's fists.
Gossip kept. Sleep kept. A wardrobe had a closing time. I knotted the ruined shirt tight, took both pouches, and went down the stair past the taproom murmur and out into the evening.
The town was dying its daily death around me as I walked. Shutters came down like eyelids, one shop at a time, and the lamplighters' poles clacked ahead of me up the lane. And then, past a chandler's gone dark, one shutter stood propped, and hanging in the light of it was a panel of black velvet with a single golden thread stitched through it, curling from corner to corner like a signature.
Inside were candle sconces and silence, the smell of wool and dye and lavender folded into cloth, bolts of fabric standing floor to ceiling like a library written in colour. Behind the counter, a woman counted coins into a lockbox, click, click, about fifty, iron-grey braid wound into a knot, a pincushion strapped to her wrist like a sidearm.
"Closed," she said, without looking up.
Then she looked up. Her eyes went down me and back the way a tailor's eyes go, and I watched her take the inventory: the knotted shirt, the two missing buttons, the hem that had stopped negotiating with the swamp sometime yesterday.
"...Though I begin to see the urgency," she said.
"I need everything. And it needs to survive a court."
Her eyebrow went up a quarter inch.
"The trial."
Not a question. She was the first soul in this town to read the whole plot off me in one pass, and I noted that too, and then the door curtain behind her rustled, and a man came through it carrying a bolt of green silk, and the world changed channels.
He stopped so completely that the silk slid out of his arms and hit the floorboards with a soft, expensive whump that nobody in the room acknowledged. Tall, spare, silver-streaked hair tied back with a ribbon, half-moon spectacles catching the candlelight, a dove-grey doublet spotless enough to perform surgery in. His nostrils flared. Once. Twice. The black at the centre of his eyes spread and swallowed everything else.
"Madam," he said. "Madam, I must- forgive me, I—"
PROXIMITY PRIORITY ENGAGED
PRIMARY ENTITY: MASTER TAILOR "ALDOUS," LV 2 — MATERIAL THREAT
FEMALE ENTITY PRESENT: UNAFFECTED. REACTING NORMALLY.
I read the last two lines twice. There it was, in the system's own dry hand, the most useful sentence of my entire stay in this world. The wife was a woman, and the woman was fine. Every man in Aldermoor was a lit fuse, and every woman was a fire brigade. The strategic map of this town had just redrawn itself while I stood in a shirt with no buttons.
The tailor had his hand pressed to his sternum like a man taking his own pulse in court.
"Thirty years," he said hoarsely. "Thirty years married, madam, and something is terribly wrong with me, for I would follow you off a pier, and my wife is standing right there."
The wife's head snapped between us. One of her hands had drifted, very naturally, to the shears on the counter.
I put both my hands up, palms out, and made the pitch, and what I noticed while making it was how level my voice came out.
"This happens to me. Often. It passes; he'll be himself after, and then we can talk about the clothes. Let me take him somewhere first. I'll pay whatever's fair."
No blush, no stammer, no apology anywhere in the stack. Somewhere in the last two days the shame had packed up and left town without saying goodbye, and logistics had moved into its room.
Maren looked at her husband, at me, at the shears, at the lockbox, and I could watch the arithmetic run: reputation against coin against whatever was moving in her face when she looked at Aldous. Whatever it was won.
"Back room," she said. "Off the merchandise." Her terms came sharp as pins. "Not a word about any of this afterwards, from either of you. And you're mending that silk yourself." A nod at the green ruin on the floor.
"Yes, my love," Aldous said, faintly, already following me toward the curtain like a hound on a scent.
The curtain swung shut behind us.
The back room held a long cutting table under a hanging lamp, a chaise with a thrown blanket, a dress form wearing half a bodice, and a three-way mirror ringed with candle sconces. He undressed me with shaking hands, and he apologised the entire time, and he tailored. It was the only language left in him. My shirt off, and his thumbs traced my spine top to bottom, murmuring measurements like a rosary. At my breasts he made a wounded sound and had to stop entirely and breathe, spectacles fogged, before he could continue with the laces of my boots, kneeling, reverent, ruined.
Then he stood and undid his fall of breeches with the same formality he'd used on my laces, and out of all that dove-grey linen swung a monster.
There was no preparing for the proportion of it. Thick, heavily veined, blunt-headed and already dripping, balls huge and drawn up tight against a modest little belly, the whole apparatus absurd below the trimmest gentleman I'd met in this world.
"Madam," Aldous said, following my gaze down. "I am so sorry about that as well."
Round one lasted thirty seconds. I know, because I counted, because counting is what I do now. He bent me over the cutting table, my forearms landing in wool scraps, and set that fat crown against me, and it barely split me; I was still adjusting around the head, still exhaling into the stretch, when he cried out in genuine anguish and erupted. Apologising throughout.
"Forgive, forgive me, madam, I—gods—" and he kept coming, pulse after pulse, longer than the entire act, so long my belly went warm and full of him while the wool scraps drank my gasps.
And he didn't soften. He swelled harder.
His second stroke was longer. His fifth longer still. I lay there over the oak doing the math on the pattern: the worse he felt about it, the longer he lasted. Guilt was a stamina stat in this world, and this man had thirty years of it banked.
Then he gathered me up like fabric, stood me on my feet facing the mirror, came in behind me, and hoisted one leg over his forearm.
Three panels of candlelit Zelia, and in every one of them a spare silver gentleman driving up into me from below, my tits swinging with each stroke, my face going slack, his mouth open against my shoulder, his spectacles fogged to white circles. Plap, plap, plap, wet skin on skin, echoing off the glass.
And he critiqued me the entire time.
"Your waist," he gritted, on an upstroke, "is twenty-four; I measured it with my hands not one minute past."
Thrust.
"The proportions of you are, hah, criminal, absolutely criminal, no house in the province could hang a bodice on you without weeping."
Thrust.
He was consulting an invisible client file while his cock rearranged my insides, and somehow that was the thing that finished me. I watched myself come apart in triplicate, three glass Zeias clenching and spraying down his shaft, the mess dripping off his swinging balls to patter on the floorboards, and he bellowed against my shoulder and pumped his third load into me standing up, still muttering something about seam allowance.
For the finale I pushed him down.
He went over backwards onto the chaise, spectacles askew, and I climbed on and rode him, and this time I reached for the new muscle the way you reach for a tool you've only read about. I found it. I bore down and rippled, inner muscles working in waves, on command, deliberate.
VELVET GRIP — ENGAGED, said the small smug window, right on time.
Master Aldous bawled.
There was no other word for the sound. Fists knotted in the cushions, spine bowing, spectacles flung crooked by the throw of his head, and he flooded me a fourth time while I milked it out of him in slow rolling waves, and that was when I noticed the doorway.
Maren stood in it. Arms crossed. Watching with the profound clinical interest of a woman observing a new dye take. She looked at her husband's face. She looked at the junction of us.
"Huh," she said, to no one. "Thirty years."
He shuddered and went still under me. Cleared. Blinked at the ceiling, then at his own hands where they gripped my hips, then at the whole mirrored obscenity of us, and I watched him age ten years in the space of three breaths.
"Maren. My love. I—"
"Not a word." She was already turning back to the shop. "Fix your trousers."
To his eternal credit, with his senses returned, Aldous became the most disciplined professional I had met in this world. The shaking was gone as if it had been presser-steamed out. He dressed me, measured me properly, chalk and tape and steady hands, not one tremor, muttering numbers, and Maren worked the seams beside him at a speed that looked like violence with a needle. They argued over me in the shorthand of people who'd argued for thirty years, sapphire against green, honey skin cited as evidence, and sapphire won.
By full dark the mirror showed me a stranger I planned to keep. A court gown that fit like a secret, bodice tight, waist nipped, skirt flowing dark over the hips, and under it shoes that fit, silken smallclothes, and a hooded travel cloak for the morning. I turned in front of the glass, and the glass turned with me, and nothing snagged, nothing gaped, and no one in a hall full of lords would look at me and see the swamp.
Maren named a sum. Then she took my hand, put the coin back in it, and closed my fingers around it.
"Changed my mind. When you win that trial, and every lord in the province asks who dressed you," she tapped the inner hem of the skirt, where the golden thread ran, "that's payment."
The first patron I'd acquired by choice instead of Charm. The ledger of gifts ran coin, then bread, then a building, and now this, the first one given for my future rather than to hurry me out the door.
"Registration's at first light," Aldous said, walking me out.
"Morning only, and the captain takes it himself. Ser Gavric. Stern as a winter fence, honest as a hammer, and old, which won't save you any."
He held the door.
"A yard full of soldiers is what's between you and that hall, madam. Go home. Sleep. And eat something green tomorrow."
The chime followed me out into the square.
UNREGISTERED ENTITY SATISFIED: ALDOUS
WIFE UNAFFECTED. WIFE IS NOW AN ASSET. THIS IS UNUSUAL.
SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: "CUT TO FIT" +20 / +40 — EXP 70/300
"An asset," I told the night air. The machinery was keeping books on my friends now. I decided to let it.
ITEM ACQUIRED: GOWN OF THE GOLDEN THREAD (+2 CHARM)
CHARM 99 + 2...
[RECALCULATING]
CHARM 99 + 2 = CHARM 99.
[MATH CHECKED TWICE]
THE DRESS IS STILL LOVELY.
I stood in the square and laughed until the echo came back off the shutters. Ninety-nine plus two, checked twice, equals ninety-nine. Even the arithmetic had given up on me. The dress was still lovely, the system's own footnote, and it was right, and somewhere behind me Maren was blowing out candles one sconce at a time while her husband knelt on the floor re-rolling the green silk like a man doing penance.
Above the rooftops, the keep's watch-fires burned on the hill, and between them and me lay a taproom with rules posted, a woman pouring her own nightcap, and a bed with my name on the key.
The menu hung in the dark, patient as ever.
[STAG, TAPROOM] / [NIGHTCAP WITH MAREN] / [EARLY NIGHT]