Chapter 31

“What’ll you have today? Basil-brushed beef brisket?” Behind the roast stall a red-haired, big-nosed young man in his twenties streaked spices across skewers with quick, practiced motions. The smell of meat rode the wind; Roy, cheeks pink from the cold, couldn’t help breathing it in.

“Give me what you recommended. Emil, load on the chili, will you? It’s getting colder by the day.” Roy brushed stray feathers from his coat and glanced up at the heavy, iron-gray sky.

Three days had passed since he arrived. November 1, the new year on the elven calendar, was close. Roy had settled into market life. The poultry stall reliably produced about thirty XP a day; the herb shop work went smoothly. He and Tross, Emil the roaster, and old Rul from the poultry pen had fallen into an easy routine. Outside of nightly training, Roy lived like any city kid trying his luck; the Witcher in his life felt, for a while, like a distant shadow.

“There you go, your kebab,” Emil said, handing over a grease-sizzling, forearm-length skewer. “You’re a regular now, so I gave you extra.”

Roy took the meat, ducked into a quiet corner and slipped it into his pocket space. He wasn’t planning to eat it himself; he intended to deliver it. As he headed to leave the market, Tross called out.

“Roy, could you take a package of honeysuckle to a washerwoman, Cuilin? She lives down in the Lower Quarter at number **, I can’t leave the stall.”

Roy had run errands for Tross a lot recently, but this was his first trip into the poor district. Henk’s warnings about The Scoia’tael flitted through his mind. Still, several days had passed; how likely was it he’d run into trouble?

“Fine,” he said.

He cut across the central market toward the east, where the cheap rows of shacks began. A wide patch of low, filthy houses flanked a narrow, fetid gutter. The smell hit him: fish, human and animal waste, the sour rot of a neighborhood left to itself. The people he passed wore thin clothes and harder faces; some men’s spines were already bowed from backbreaking labor. Compared with the neat, bright wealthy district, this place was a different world.