The sign wasn't even up yet, but people were already slowing down to stare at the shop Sara was setting up now.
She noticed it from the corner of her eye while she was directing two of her field workers to shift a display table three feet to the left inside the small shop. A hunter with a pack still strapped to her back had stopped dead in the middle of the road, head tilted, watching the crates being carried through the open doorway. Two adventurers Sara didn't recognize leaned against the fence across the lane, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the half-assembled weapon rack near the front window.
She turned back to her worker as they put the display table down. "That's better. Keep it that way. Now the light from the window hits directly at the blades first. I told you, didn't I? Nobody's going to see what's on the table if it's stuck in shadow. This position is better."
The woman nodded and dragged the table into its new spot with a scrape of wood on the floorboards.
The shop was small, just the front room of the two-story building Sara had claimed the day after the guild sent notice that they were coming. She hadn't wasted time. She knew that the space near the guild branch would disappear faster than fresh bread at a festival, so she had been planning this exact moment since the day she first convinced Lord Valtor to pull strings in the capital. That was why she sent Madam Vesper to get some new trending weapons from the capital, and she was also the one who had pushed the guild representatives to buy the exact spot where they built their guild now. She planned everything.
She knew how these things worked. The first shops to open close to the guild usually set the tone for everything that followed in that village. And this village was going to be no exception.
The shop still smelled like fresh-cut pine and the dusty scent of items freshly unpacked from capital crates. Not unpleasant. But it still made her nose tingle a little.
Bertha was up the ladder at the front of the building, broad back to the street, hammering the shop sign into place with the same focused efficiency she brought to everything. Her dress was already damp across the shoulders from working till morning, but she hadn't said a word about it. She wasn't the type to complain after all.
Below her, two more of Sara's field workers were arranging the window display: a short sword, a balanced hunting knife, and the set of regional maps Sara had spent three full days negotiating the copying rights for from the guild's survey files.
Those maps were probably the smartest thing she placed on the display. Every adventurer who walked in needing to navigate the Gaiya forest was going to want one. And only she had the legal right to sell them in this village. She knew that was not going to stop people from selling it altogether, but still, at least it made her shop stand out from others.
"Oof, this one's heavy," one of the workers said, setting down a crate of leather armor pieces with a solid thud. "Where do you want these, Miss Sara?"
"Back wall. Stack them by size, smallest at eye level. And the medium-weight vests go front and center; people always reach for those first."
"Yes, Miss Sara."
Bertha climbed down from the ladder and wiped her hands on her apron. Then she stepped back to look at the sign from the street angle. "Hmm, looks straight, I think," she said, blunt as ever. "You sure Madam Vesper won't get angry about this? You're selling weapons she sold you, right across from where she's set up. I wouldn't be happy about that if I were her."
Sara picked up a hunting blade from the display table and checked the edge, tilting it toward the window light. "No problem on that side. I already talked to her."
"And she said yes?"
"Yes, she said yes, Bertha." Sara was sick of her asking this single question for the 10th time at least in just this single morning.
She set the blade back down and straightened the row of knives by half an inch. "She said, as long as we stick to basic equipment, standard weapons, leather armor, maps, and consumables, she's fine with it. She even agreed to supply me directly when my current stock runs low. Madam Vesper wants to be the only premium weapon seller in this village. She's not interested in the everyday stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm selling this stuff."
"Hmm." Bertha crossed her arms and looked at the display table again. "She sure is a smart woman, as usual."
"Yeah, no kidding," Sara said. "That's why I went to her first instead of the other way around."
----
As they were talking, outside, the small cluster of watchers had grown. Three more adventurers had drifted over and were standing near the window, peering in.
A woman with a hunting bow slung across her back was reading the sign with visible interest. One man and a woman Sara didn't recognize, new arrivals, judging by the look of their gear, had stopped walking entirely and were talking while pointing at the weapon rack.
From somewhere down the road, the familiar tone of village gossip carried on the breeze.
"....already owns half the fields on the south side, and now she's opening a shop? That woman can't be happy with what she has…"
"....bet she pressured that guild clerk somehow, getting that space…."
"Yeah, typical, isn't it. The rich ones always find a way to…"
Bertha's jaw tightened slightly. She looked at Sara to see how she was taking it.
Sara was arranging a row of belt pouches on the display table and had apparently developed a sudden deep interest in the buckle quality of each one.
"You heard that, right, Miss Sara?" Bertha asked her flatly.
"Yeah, I heard it, so what?" Sara replied, without changing her tone or her focus. She checked a buckle, found it acceptable, and moved to the next. "I've been hearing things like that since the day I inherited the land from my father. It doesn't stop the belt pouches from selling, do they?"
Bertha made a sound that was roughly in agreement and, without saying anything else, went to help a worker with the armor crate.
The thing about criticism from people who had less than you was that it always assumed you'd gotten what you had without doing anything to earn it. Sara had watched her father manage the land for fifteen years before she took it over. She'd learned what the soil needed, which tenants were reliable, which contracts to renew, and which to let expire. She'd spent the past eight months building the settlement relationship that ultimately brought the guild here in the first place. Though it had mostly something to do with Lys's help, still, she had not done any of that by accident or by standing in a field waiting for wealth to arrive.
So, she isn't going to be fazed by this simple criticism now, either.
She straightened the last belt pouch and stepped back to look at the full display.