Dunveth was not what Kael had expected, mostly because he hadn't known what to expect, which he was beginning to understand was how most things worked.
It was larger than Mirvel — considerably — but it had the feeling of a place that had grown sideways rather than upward, spreading along the river in both directions until someone had presumably told it to stop. The buildings were close together and slightly misaligned, as if each one had been built by a person who hadn't spoken to their neighbours first. Boats sat low in the water along the docks. The streets smelled like fish and coal smoke and something sweet underneath it that Kael couldn't name.
"Rendered fat," Aldric said, without being asked. "There's a chandler nearby. The smell carries."
"You know the smell of rendered fat?"
"I know many things." A pause. "Our estate had a chandler."
Kael said nothing. Aldric said nothing else. They walked.
The east road fed into a main street that fed into a market square that was winding down for the morning, merchants packing early or settling in for the long part of the day with their feet up. A woman sold something from a basket that might have been bread. A boy led a goat on a rope that the goat was substantially winning. Two men argued near a fountain in the slow particular way of people who had been arguing about this same thing for years and had stopped expecting resolution.
It felt like a real place. That still surprised Kael, each new town — that the world was full of real places with real people inside them, doing real things, completely indifferent to the fact that he had only just arrived.
"The Pale Scale," Aldric said, consulting nothing — he had read Torvas's directions once on the road and apparently filed them somewhere permanent. "South end of the dock quarter. Warehouse frontage. We're looking for a building with a white fish painted above the door."
"That's the mark of a scale trader," Kael said.
Aldric looked at him. "How do you know that?"
"Bren traded wool sometimes. He described the signs." Kael paused. "He said the fish meant they weighed things honestly. Or that they wanted you to think they did."
"Your uncle sounds like a complicated man."
"He was." Kael thought about it. "He is. I don't know why I said was."
Aldric didn't answer that. He turned them south.
---
The Pale Scale was exactly what Torvas had described: warehouse front, white fish above the door, the general impression of a building that did legitimate business loudly enough at the front to justify whatever it kept quiet at the back. Through the open main doors, Kael could see crates and bales and two workers moving things with the efficient boredom of men who moved things all day.
They stood across the street for a moment.
"We need a reason to be inside," Aldric said.
"We're buyers," Kael said.
"Of what?"
"We don't know yet. We're browsing."
Aldric considered this with the expression of a man who had expected to construct the plan himself and was mildly affronted that a reasonable one had appeared without him. "That's not terrible," he said, which Kael had already learned was high praise.
"You should do the talking," Kael said. "You sound like you buy things from warehouses."
"I have, in fact, bought things from warehouses."
"I know. That's why I said it."
Something passed across Aldric's face that might, in a different light, have been gratitude. He smoothed his coat. He straightened his collar. He became, in the space of three seconds, the kind of person who walked into warehouses and expected people to be helpful to him.
It was genuinely impressive, Kael thought. Whatever Aldric had lost when his family's money ran out, he hadn't lost that.
---
The man at the front desk was large in the way of someone who had once been very strong and had since become merely solid. He had the look of a man called Torve or Brant or something that ended in a hard consonant, and he was writing in a ledger with the concentration of someone who found writing difficult but necessary.
"Help you," he said. Not a question.
"We're looking for waxed cloth," Aldric said. "Waterproofed. A specific grade — I believe your establishment trades in Dunveth-treated stock."
The man looked up. He looked at Aldric. He looked at Kael.
Kael attempted to look like someone who cared about waxed cloth.
"Back quarter," the man said. "Maret handles cloth. She's in."
He went back to his ledger.
Aldric led them through without pause, past a row of crates marked in chalk, past a side door that was closed, past a staircase going down that had a different kind of quiet around it than the rest of the building. Kael noticed the staircase. He filed it away.
Maret turned out to be a small, sharp-faced woman of about forty who had clearly been in the middle of an inventory count and found their arrival personally offensive.
"Waxed cloth," she said. "What weight?"
"Medium," Aldric said smoothly. "For outerwear. We're provisioning for an extended journey — two people, variable weather."
Maret looked at them both. Her eyes moved to Aldric's coat, then to Kael's pack, then back to Aldric. She had the gaze of someone who had spent a career deciding quickly whether people were worth her time.
She decided something. Kael wasn't sure what.
"I've got three grades. I'll show you the mid-weight first." She turned and moved deeper into the back quarter, expecting them to follow.
Aldric fell into step. Kael followed, and as he did he let his eyes move — not obviously, not in the way that said I am looking for something — but in the way Bren had taught him without calling it anything, the way of taking in a room so completely that you could describe it later with your eyes closed.
Shelving along the left wall. Three locked cabinets at the far end. Another door, this one with a bar across it from the inside, which meant whatever was behind it was being kept in, not out. A smell underneath the warehouse smell — paper and oil, the specific smell of things being stored carefully.
*Records*, Kael thought. *Someone keeps records back there.*
And one grey ledger among those records, probably, with a duck on it that was trying to leave.
"This is the mid-weight," Maret said, holding up a folded square of treated cloth. "Six threads to the inch. Won't breathe much but it'll turn water."
"Hmm," Aldric said, with the professional dissatisfaction of a man who had expected better.
Kael looked at the barred door.
He looked at Maret.
He looked at Aldric, and found that Aldric was already looking at him with an expression that said *I see it too, I'm working on it, do not do anything yet.*
Kael was slightly annoyed to be read that accurately. He was also, underneath that, relieved.
"What's the thread count on your heavy stock?" Aldric asked, and his voice had shifted just slightly — more weight behind it, the way it did sometimes when he wanted people to feel they were being evaluated rather than sold to. "I was told Dunveth-treated heavy canvas was the standard for expedition work. If your mid-weight is representative of the grade —"
Maret's chin came up. "My heavy stock is the best in the dock quarter."
"Then perhaps we should see it," Aldric said pleasantly.
Maret looked at him for a moment. Then she turned and walked toward the far shelving, and as she did her back was to the barred door for the first time.
Kael didn't move. Not yet. He was seventeen years old and he was learning, among other things, that *yet* was one of the most important words there was.
But he looked at the bar on the door, and he thought about the staircase going down, and he thought about how a collector named Brek Solan might store things he had acquired under circumstances nobody could take to a magistrate.
And he thought: *We're going to need a better reason to come back.*
"Beautiful weight," Aldric was saying, running the heavy canvas between his fingers with the practised appreciation of someone who had grown up with fine things and still remembered what they felt like. "Though I wonder — do you carry anything in oiled linen? My companion has a sensitivity to wax treatments."
Kael looked at him.
Aldric did not look back. His face was entirely composed, entirely professional, entirely the face of a man whose companion had a sensitivity to wax treatments.
"Oiled linen," Maret said. "That's specialty stock. I'd have to check the back."
"We'd be very grateful," Aldric said.
She went through the barred door. She unbarred it from her side, and went through, and left it open behind her.
Kael had approximately four seconds of unobserved view into the back room before Maret reached a shelf on the far wall.
It was enough.
Shelves floor to ceiling. Ledgers and boxes and rolled documents. And on the second shelf from the bottom, in a row of perhaps twenty ledgers of various colours, a grey spine with something dark at its lower corner.
He couldn't see the duck from here. But he knew the shape of left-facing.
"Found it," Maret called. She came back through with a square of oiled linen, and she barred the door behind her with the automatic motion of someone who always did that, without thinking about it, which meant the bar was habit and the habit meant the room was worth protecting.
"Lovely," Aldric said, taking the linen. He examined it with slow professional care for thirty seconds, which was long enough for Kael to memorise the distance from the door to the second shelf from the bottom, and the rough number of ledgers to the left of the grey one, and the height of the window at the far end of the back room that had been open three inches and looked out onto what smelled like an alley.
"I think this might be what we need," Aldric said. "We'll need to discuss it — compare it against the mid-weight we saw earlier. Would it be possible to come back this afternoon? Before the market closes?"
Maret looked at them with the expression of someone who had made a career of taking the measure of people quickly. "Before the third bell," she said. "After that I'm locked up."
"Before the third bell," Aldric confirmed, with a small incline of his head that somehow managed to convey: *we are serious buyers and you have been helpful and this has been a pleasure.*
They thanked her. They left.
---
Outside, on the street, they walked half a block before either of them spoke.
"Second shelf from the bottom," Kael said. "Grey spine, eighth from the left. There's a window in the alley side that's open."
Aldric was quiet for three steps. "The window is too small for either of us."
"It's too small for us to climb through," Kael agreed. "It's not too small for an arm."
Another three steps.
"I would like it noted," Aldric said, "that I am a person of standing, and what we are currently planning is not something persons of standing typically do."
"You said your estate had a chandler."
"What does that have to do with —"
"It means you grew up somewhere with back rooms and bars on doors and things kept quietly," Kael said. "Which means you've thought about how to get into places like that before." He paused. "I'm guessing you have."
Aldric walked for a moment longer. His coat was still perfectly straight. His expression was the expression of a man who was not going to confirm or deny anything.
"There's a tavern two streets back," he said finally. "We have until the third bell. We should eat something, and I should think, and you should not suggest anything that involves either of us going through a window regardless of the size."
"The arm isn't going through the window," Kael said. "Just a hand."
"A hand attached to an arm attached to a person is still a person going through a window, Kael."
"Philosophically."
"Yes," Aldric said. "Philosophically. Exactly." He stopped. He looked at Kael with the specific expression that Kael was learning meant *you are going to be the most difficult person I have ever travelled with and I have not yet decided how I feel about that.*
Then he turned and walked toward the tavern.
Kael followed. He was already thinking about the third bell, and the window, and whether a duck facing left looked different up close than it did from across a room.
He had a feeling it looked exactly the same.