Vergil looked uncertain towards Tallah. She nodded at him, encouragingly.


    “Vergil Vansce. Pleased to meet you, Mister Toh’Uhm.” He mangled the throaty pronunciation but the large man just laughed.


    “Just Tummy to my friends. If you’re her friend, then you’re mine as well. What armour do you need?”


    “I have no idea. Today’s been weird,” Vergil answered candidly, looking again to her for help.


    “Make him something sturdy that he can grow into,” Tallah said. “I need it to be strong, magically resistant preferably, and easy to adjust. Plate preferably. He’s still filling out after some bad times. No frills and nothing to attract attention.”


    Tummy scratched his large chest, thinking.


    “What about weapons? You need any?”


    Tallah tapped her lips with her index finger and turned to Vergil.


    “Do you have any axe training?”


    “No, none,” he replied. “I can learn though.”


    It was as satisfactory an answer as she could expect. He would likely be useless with any weapon but the ghost in the helmet was of a dwarf and axes had been a preference for his species. Tummy produced a small writing pad on which he took notes with a sharpened piece of charcoal.


    “You told me once that you had some friends here from old Lang. I need hand axes, four of them, modelled after what the dwarves used to wield. Also, a short sword. Something like a gladius, not like the ones you made for me.” She thought for a while more while he finished scribbling down her order. “And, you can make him one of those stupid big claymores, and a war hammer. Weight them up for yourself.”


    Tummy raised an eyebrow over his round spectacles and then looked at Vergil more closely. The boy shrugged. He looked like a dressed bag of bones holding up straight by force of will.


    “Pull the other one. It’s got bells on,” Tummy said. Vergil looked similarly confused.


    “I have high hopes for him.” She brushed off both of their stares.


    “Fine by me. Hold this, Vergil.”


    He handed his notepad to the boy and began patting his pockets until he produced a worn measuring tape.


    “You tight for money?” he asked and retrieved his notepad. He began sketching with a deftness that seemed almost unnatural for his large build.


    “How soon can you have it ready?” she replied.


    “How soon you need it?”


    “Soon. I need to train him before Thaw.”


    “Couple of days. Got other work but it’ll keep,” he rumbled, scratching his cheek with the charcoal tip.


    Tallah smiled, “Then you know I’m good for the money. I’ll be settling my debt.”


    He chuckled at that. If she could settle her entire debt to him and Mertle, she could as well be buying half of Valen. She knew it well enough and he was kind enough not to say it to her face.


    Since Mertle hadn’t made an appearance while they were talking, Tallah left Tummy to measure and question Vergil for the gear. She made her way to the backroom door and gently pushed it open. Nothing clattered to the floor so she opened it fully and stepped into the workshop proper. The heat was stifling inside, with a forge fire burning bright in the back. Tummy was melting some lump of metal in a crucible.


    Diagrams covered the walls and tools hung on supports, neatly stacked and labelled, very different from the front image. Tallah stepped carefully past the pile of metal odds and ends that had dropped off an overloaded shelf. It wasn’t the only one.


    This place keeps getting more and more cluttered. At some point I won’t be able to even find them in here.


    The elendine worked bent-over an overcrowded table. Her attire mirrored Tummy’s, revealing her tattooed bare back. She was carefully inscribing the inside of a leather doublet with runes that burned with a soft light before sinking into the material. Each intricate rune was no larger than a fingernail and she worked with slow, deft strokes of her quill.


    “And here I thought you’d be jumping for joy to see me,” Tallah said as she walked up to her.


    Mertle startled at the interruption and misspelled the rune she had been painstakingly working on. The doublet immediately turned grey and collapsed into a pile of ash that spilled off the table.


    “Aw, poop,” she said, with an almost sad sigh, quill in one hand and ink well in the other.


    “I hope that wasn’t too valuable,” Tallah said.


    “No, no, it was just three days of work. I’ll start over.”


    Mertle spun around with a jolt, dark eyes widening in surprise.


    “Tallah!” She threw her arms around the sorceress. Her entire ink well spilled on the floor.


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    “Oh poop, not again.” She pulled away and ran for a mop before the ink could start eating its way through the smooth stone.


    She was short, her head barely up to Tianna’s chest. She wore her red hair long and tied in an intricate braid down her bare back. Two jagged, curving bone horns protruded from her brow and arched back over her head.


    “Considering your trade, how in blazes are you still such a klutz? That stuff can’t be cheap.” Tallah had stepped aside while Mertle took care of her corrosive ink-spill.


    “Don’t sneak up on me like that, Tallah,” she admonished while she mopped up the sizzling ink, running twice to a bucket of water to clean the well-used mop. The ink boiled the water. “You could set us both on fire. Or explode. Or… I don’t know. Something bad.” Words tumbled out of her as she cleaned the floor to a mirror shine. “Don’t sneak up on me, all right? I’ve missed you. When did you get back? Where’s Sil? Is she still mad at me? I hope she’s not still mad; I didn’t mean to laugh at her about the whole, you know, incident.”


    Tallah held her hands out and gestured for the elendine to slow down.


    “Easy, Mertle. Breathe. Sil’s doing some shopping of her own. She’s assured me she’s not still mad you.”


    Sil was, in fact, livid if Tallah so much as breathed about the incident. Christina had made it a personal mission to insert comment of that moment of carelessness with the helmet at any possible opportunity.


    “Are you sure?” Mertle’s slanted deep black eyes stared a hole through Tallah’s.


    “Fairly sure, yes,” Tallah lied with a smile. “We’ve missed you too, Mertle. How about a cup of coffee? I think Tummy and my friend are going to be a while up front.”


    “You have a friend? Who?”


    “I’ll introduce you later.”


    The elendine set down her mop in its bucket against the wall and rummaged through a cupboard for two clean cups. She set them down on her work bench and brought a kettle of hot water off a small stove. From another cupboard—the chaos of her arrangements never ceased to amaze and intrigue—she brought out tin of dehydrated coffee. Three teaspoons for herself, one for Tallah’s mug. Elend blended their coffee strong enough that it wasn’t quite safe for human consumption. Or for any other species save vanadals. It outright killed the aelir. Tallah suspected that was the original intent for the drink.


    “I assume your hunt went well if you’re back?” Mertle asked while sipping from her cup. She burned her tongue but didn’t admit to it. It showed on her face. She had propped up some boxes as chairs for them while they caught up.


    Tallah sighed and nodded. It wasn’t a subject she was ready or willing to breach, and Mertle, for all her air-hotheadedness, understood.


    “I need you to make me some new gear. My old one got cut up to ribbons. I think most of its enchantments got destroyed.”


    Mertle wrinkled her nose at that.


    “You never asked me to design them to be cut-proof,” she said with a pout. “It’s why I made you the carapace.”


    “Carapace was all I had hoped it would be. Make me a new one like that. Old one got stabbed too many times.”


    The glare she got back would have stripped paint from the wall.


    “What did you do, Tallah? Is Sil all right?”


    She chuckled and sipped her deathtrap coffee. “Sil’s fine. She handles herself better than an Iluna when we’re out and about. We have a bodyguard now. He’s the friend upfront with Tummy.”


    Without slackening the glare, Mertle thought for a time. “I’ve had some success with my current batch of runes. I can add something experimental to your usual. I’ve actually been testing many of the new combinations I got from the tomes you translated for me.”


    She blew on her coffee before taking another sip.


    “Your translations still need work, if you don’t mind me saying. I set Tummy’s hand on fire with a rune word that was supposed to make an object heat-resistant. Heat-resistant and highly-flammable are not the same thing, you know?”


    I told you so, child. She should have made a pair for you. Christina forced an image of a smug grin into Tallah’s imagination. Next time remember which of us is the more accomplished scholar.


    “Have you had any success with exotics?” Tallah asked, hiding her grimace behind her coffee mug. She pointedly ignored the psychic jab.


    “Dragon scales, you mean? Got a few. Bought them off an adventurer. Tummy’s infusing some silver chain weave with their essence right now. I was saving it up for you. I think it’s exactly enough for a pair of gloves.”


    Mertle’s glaring gave way to squeaking excitement and she almost dashed away to bring the red-hot weave. Tallah grabbed her by the hem of her apron before she bounced away.


    “I’ll trust that it’s excellent then,” she said calmly. “How much heat will I be able to output with that?”


    “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about heat any more, not for your hands. They should be able to resist anything short of actual dragon fire.” She stopped talking and stared at Tallah for a moment, frowning. “Can you reach as high as dragon fire now?”


    “Ha! I wish. Still far from that.”


    “Good. The convection will be an issue since neither my breathing masks nor my tunics are yet that good. But if you push heat away from you, you’ll be good to go as hot as you want.”


    Tallah made a mental note of that. Her fireballs and heat lances would improve if she could increase the temperature without fear of the backwash, which would have her rely less on more aggressive and illum inefficient weaves. The bonus was that Sil would worry less about her illum expenditures and stop chewing her face off every time she needed to exert herself.


    “And you’re in luck. I have some really good gold-tongue hide for a new carapace.” Mertle twisted the word, displeased that her work had gone to tatters again.


    She had her old sketch pad out, leafing through the ripped and falling pages until she found a tightly annotated sketch of Tallah herself.


    “When do you need everything?”


    “Soon as you can, like always. But don’t feel pressured. I’m waiting for a caravan to come through the snow from Drack so I can head to Solstice. But you know that won’t happen until we’re on the lip of Thaw,” Tallah answered, putting down her empty cup. She refused a second.


    “Awww, you’re leaving again. You owe me dinner,” Mertle whined at her as she made her annotations on the drawing with the new requests. “I’m not giving you a single piece of gear until you take me out to dinner.” Her eyes twinkled.


    “Sil owes you dinner. How about I tell her to be a big girl and come take you out?” Tallah asked, a bit of mischief in her voice. “She’s had time enough to grow a backbone since we’ve come back.”


    Maybe it’s what she needs to stop niggling us.


    Mertle blushed all the way to the top of her ears, turning her already tan complexion almost black. She tried to stammer out an answer but Tallah understood every unsaid word.


    “Tomorrow then, about this time. You know what she likes.”


    “Can she be herself? Please?” Mertle almost whispered, still mostly black with embarrassment. “It feels wrong to hold hands with an aelir.”


    “I’ll ask her nicely. For you.”