Crescentine Fleur was dead. He had been dead for months. The hero of Medalline had fallen on the northern border and been confirmed by the King of Winterly himself.
There was no face connected to the name Leigh. No record of this settlement, no trail leading back to it. The illusion I wore outside the settlement made sure of that.
A palace herbalist looking at a dried herb was not a risk. It was just a herbalist looking at a dried herb.
"Fine." I said. "When you have the value, we finalize the price."
Amanda nodded, relief settling into her expression. Not the relief of someone who had gotten away with something.
The relief of someone who had said the honest thing and had it land the right way.
I picked up the quill and added a clause at the bottom of the scroll. Clean and simple. The profit share and purchase price to be determined pending the herbalist's assessment of the herb's market value.
Either a profit sharing arrangement or a direct purchase price to be agreed upon by both parties once the valuation was complete.
Until then, all other terms stood.
I turned the scroll toward her.
Amanda read the new clause, then picked up the quill and signed.
I signed beside her name.
The contract sealed itself with a faint glow as the magic in the scroll confirmed both signatures. Amanda watched it with wide eyes for just a moment before composing herself.
She looked at the signed scroll and then at me.
"I'll contact my friend this week." She said. "As soon as I have something I'll use the stone."
I nodded and reached for the scroll.
"Brother Leigh." Torra's voice came from across the shop. He had finished his cake and was now watching us with the focused attention of someone who had been patient for a very long time and felt that patience deserved acknowledgment. "Are you done?"
I looked at Amanda.
She smiled and started to stand.
"We're done." I said.
I snapped everything from Amanda's shop into my item box in one sweep. The shelves cleared. The display cases emptied. The staff had already packed everything securely and it all disappeared without ceremony.
I set a pouch on the counter without counting it out loud. Two hundred gold coins. Then I walked out.
Torra and Rafa were already outside and running before I had cleared the doorway. Kalan fell into step beside me, quieter than before but noticeably lighter.
The strawberry cake had apparently been the right call. He wasn't saying anything about it but he didn't need to.
The seed shop was two streets over. The old couple who ran it saw us coming through the window and were already moving before we reached the door.
That was new, from the early months. They had figured out the pattern. Whatever I asked about, they wrote down and chased through their suppliers. Whatever came in rare or unusual, they set aside and waited.
When I came, I bought everything. So they made sure everything worth buying was ready for me.
The old woman met us at the door.
"We got three new varieties in this month. I thought of you the moment they arrived." She said, already leading me to the reserved section at the back.
I looked through it. New seedlings, rare bulbs, two varieties of fruit bearing plants I hadn't seen before. I scanned them without making it obvious and filed away what each one was good for.
"Everything." I said. "Except tools. We have what we need."
The old man was already pulling out the packaging.
Kalan drifted through the shop while they worked, Rafa pulling him from display to display. Then Rafa found something and called his father over and they stood together looking at a pruner mounted on the wall.
A good one. Well balanced, clean blade. Kalan picked it up and turned it over in his hands carefully, the way he handled everything. He put it back without saying anything.
I added it to the order without comment.
When everything was packed and stored in my item box, I paid and we headed back out into the market.
Torra was already at the far end of the stalls by then.
Somehow, over the course of the months we had been coming here, he had managed to make friends with half the vendors in the market.
He moved between the stalls greeting people by name, stopping to chat, laughing at things. His energy was the kind that spread without trying to.
People smiled when they saw him coming because he was already smiling before he arrived.
He had his fireworks out, turning it over in his fingers as he walked, the way another child might fidget with a coin or a pebble.
Rafa had his own out too, the two of them occasionally making them flicker as they moved through the crowd.
I watched them from a distance.
The fireworks had started as something I made to stop Torra from pestering me. Since then I had adjusted them more times than I had kept count of.
They no longer ran out of mana.
They worked as locators.
And after a conversation with Frostina that I had not particularly enjoyed but had found useful, I had worked her scales into the construction.
Her scales were a barrier medium. The ice shield that would emerge if danger came within ten meters of the bearer was reliable, fast, and strong enough to matter.
To the mages in any of these kingdoms, what Torra and Rafa were casually carrying around and calling toys would be classified as high grade artifacts.
Objects that took master enchanters months to produce, if they could produce them at all.
To the children in the settlement, they were just toys.
And I had started thinking of them that way too.
That was the thing about living in the settlement. My standard of things had become their standard.
The Chilper herb was a weed to me.
The Glowfruit was something I had picked up off the ground in the Abyssal Forest and replanted without much thought.
Teleporting across kingdoms was just how I got somewhere.
They had adopted all of it without question. Because I said it was nothing much, it became nothing much.
I wasn't sure when that had stopped bothering me.
And I was thinking about this when Torra ran straight into a knight on patrol.
The knight went backwards. Torra stayed where he was.
The knight hit the ground. Torra looked down at him with wide eyes and then immediately crouched and started apologizing, one hand already reaching out to help him up despite the clear size difference making that gesture mostly symbolic.
The knight stood, more from his own effort than Torra's, and stared at the child in front of him trying to work out what had just happened. His eyes dropped to the fireworks in Torra's hand.
"What is that?" He asked.
Torra held it out without a second thought.
"It's my toy. Brother Leigh made it for me." He said cheerfully.
The knight took it and looked at it properly.
His expression changed.
The rune encryption alone was layered in ways that most court mages would spend a career trying to understand.
The magic circles underneath were precise to a degree that shouldn't have been possible at that scale. He turned it over slowly, the cold he had been standing in for hours completely forgotten.
I stepped up behind Torra.
The illusion on my face didn't show him anything it wasn't supposed to. But something came through anyway, the same way it always did regardless of what face I was wearing.
The knight's eyes found mine and something in his posture changed before his brain had finished deciding what to do about it.
He held the fireworks back out to Torra immediately.
And Torra took it.
The knight stepped to the side and made room without being asked.
We walked past him toward the alley.
Behind us I heard nothing for a long moment. Then another knight's voice calling the first one's name, asking why he was just standing there.
I didn't hear the answer.
We stepped into the alley and I teleported us back.
Torra and Rafa hit the ground running the moment we arrived, already shouting toward the Sequoia tree that they were back.
The residents looked up from what they were doing and the usual wave of responses came back across the settlement.
Kalan was standing beside me holding the pruner I had added to the order. He had noticed when I pulled it out with the rest of the purchases. He hadn't said anything then either.
He was just holding it now, turning it over the same careful way he had in the shop, looking at it like he was still making sure it was real.
The smell of dinner was already coming from the kitchen area. The others were gathered and working, passing things between each other, the settlement settling into its evening rhythm.
Kalan finally looked up from the pruner.
"Thank you, Leigh." He said quietly.
I had already started walking toward the Sequoia tree.
"It was in the order." I said.