Something about his tone bothered Viv, something plaintive, but he already sounded so eerie that maybe it wasn’t worth marking. Still, Satchel was regarding one of the bookshelves with strange intensity.
Viv opened her mouth to ask, and—
“Guess that’s that then, huh?” said Gallina, clapping her hands to the armrests. “And if Varine does show her face, well …” She fingered the knives on her bandolier. “Maybe it won’t be so boring around here.”
“Let’s not tempt the Eight, shall we?” said Fern.
Viv didn’t miss the way Satchel stilled at that exchange. His jawbone opened as though he meant to speak, but then it slowly closed, and he turned away.
She watched him thoughtfully, then tilted her staff toward the gnome. “On that note, I’m heading up the bluff to get in a little workout. Are you game?”
Gallina was.
24
Viv’s feelings of high alert ebbed slowly over the following days. No invading army of wights appeared on the horizon, and no gray-clad strangers menaced them. In fact, nothing happened to warrant so much as a suspicious glance, much less a bared blade.
In her experience though, things tended to get quiet right before they got loud.
They discovered that Satchel became even more nervous when customers entered the store. Any time the door opened, he collapsed instantly and rolled his component bones underneath one of the shelves, only emerging when Fern reassured him that the intruders were gone.
Potroast also liked to gnaw at his ankles and could not be deterred.
As a result, Satchel mostly kept to his satchel during the day.
Maylee showed up one late afternoon, put her fists on her hips, and demanded, “Well, where is he?”
When Fern sprinkled dust over the bones and Satchel made his rattling appearance, she took it in stride. Viv supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, given her history. When the dwarf extended a hand for the homunculus to shake, Viv couldn’t help but think of her long-ago encounter with the goblin across the river.
Fern rigged a box on the countertop with a slit in the front that Satchel could occupy during the day, but for the most part, the homunculus preferred to be up and about outside of business hours. The animating force granted by the bonedust ebbed over the day, and he seemed to sense when it would desert him.
While awake, however, he could not be dissuaded from tidying and arranging, with rag and broom, soap and polish.
“I can’t get him to stop,” Fern said, chin in paw. She looked miserable. “It’s not right. I can’t let him just … do things around here without paying him.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “He insists he doesn’t want anything. That it’s his choice. But that doesn’t make it any better.”
Thistleburr was definitely tidier. The wooden floors fairly glowed, the walls had been washed, and Viv could swear that Satchel must have trimmed away the errant binding threads on some of the older volumes. Even the scent indoors was improved, smelling more strongly of paper and ink and wood wax than dust and salt and gryphet.
“Maybe you need to start lending him books, too,” said Viv, only half joking.
“Does he read, do you think?” she asked, glancing toward the box on the counter, currently occupied.
“He has a better vocabulary than I do.” Viv unwrapped another of Maylee’s brown paper packages. Four enormous, rugged scones lay tucked within, larded with nuts and fruit. The gryphet napping on the floor twitched in his sleep and uttered a drowsy hoot but didn’t wake.
Fern selected one and nibbled at it as they watched Addis, the gnome who owned the perpetually closed junk shop, ambling slowly beside a shelf. Addis was a serial browser, and Viv had never once seen him purchase a book. He muttered a lot to himself and often selected a volume, only to open it, nod as though discovering some important bit of information, and then reshelve it. Viv found it maddening, but Fern seemed used to it.
“Must not be any silver in the junk business,” muttered Viv as Addis rejected yet another book.
“Speaking of a lack of money, did I tell you I finally ordered that fresh shipment?”
“The one you’d been marking in the catalog?”
Fern sighed. “I guess I forgot to mention it. Although there’s been an awful lot going on these past few days.” She knocked gently on the top of Satchel’s box, and a very quiet bump echoed back from within.
Viv leaned more heavily on the counter, extending her leg and flexing it. It was sturdier by the day. “I thought you said you didn’t have the room? Satch—Uh, I mean it’s definitely more organized, but where are you going to put the new books?”
“I suppose I’ll have to stack them in the back. I can barely get to my bed as it is, though. There are old books everywhere. I live under threat of perpetual landslide. Still, I have to try something. I’m doing a little better financially, but if I can’t get things to pick up …”
“It’d be best if you could sell the old ones though, wouldn’t it?”
Fern stopped with her scone halfway to her mouth. “My, what a brilliant fucking idea. Whyever didn’t I consider that? Thanks.”
“If there are that many books people don’t want, though, then what’s the use in having them around?”
“They’re books. You don’t just throw them away.”
“I didn’t say that! But … I mean, if nobody wants them, then …”
“They just don’t know they want them yet. That’s the point. How many have you been through now?”
“Well …”
“Plenty, that’s how many. I just had to get them into your hands. The right hands.” She put the scone down. “That’s the whole gods-damned problem, isn’t it?”
Viv considered the unfolded brown paper and the remaining scone waiting atop it. Toying with the string, she murmured, “Yeah, I guess the thing is not knowing what you want. Having to pick it in the first place, when you don’t know what’s out there …”
The rattkin searched her face. “Sure. But some folks don’t want to be led. And sometimes, I don’t know what they want either. A lot of the time, honestly.” She cocked a thumb at Addis. “Like this one, for instance.”
“Well,” continued Viv, an idea firming in her mind, “what if they didn’t have to know? Or at least, not much?”
“What are you getting at?”
“We didn’t know what we’d be getting in this package from Maylee. We might not have picked these at all. But we’re eating them, aren’t we?”
The rattkin retrieved her scone and examined it thoughtfully. “Go on …”
“And the surprise is part of it too, right?” Viv ate one in two quick bites. “It’s almost better because we didn’t know. So—”
“So what if we wrapped up the books?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“Maybe more than one.” Fern’s eyes lit up as the idea took root in her mind. “Tie them up with string. Like little presents.”
“Maybe write a few words on there. Give people some idea of what they’re in for.” Viv thought about Ten Links in the Chain. “Swordfights. Beheadings. Betrayals?”