Chapter 282: The Market

Vane had just finished putting on his jacket when Ashe found him after the morning session. The fact that she was already waiting told him she’d anticipated this moment and he definitely hadn’t.

“Lower district,” she said without preamble. “Now.”

He looked down at his jacket, barely settled on his shoulders. “I literally just put this on.”

“I know. I watched you put it on from the corridor.” She was already turning toward the door. “Come on.”

What else could he do? He followed her down the hill.

The Academy’s lower district sat three tiers below the academic wing, accessible by a stone staircase that wound around the hill’s southern face. It wasn’t Korreth, which had centuries of accumulated character and a fish vendor who knew three generations of Razars by name. This was a working market built to serve a floating island full of cultivators. Which meant it was loud and dense and smelled of a dozen different things at once, with the specific organic logic of a place that had been arranged not by planning but by years of repeated use.

Ashe moved through it like she owned the place, at the pace of someone who’d already decided where she was going and found hesitation to be a waste of time. Vane kept up. He’d been keeping up with Ashe Razar since the compound steps in Korreth, and he’d learned by now that this wasn’t optional.

She stopped at the first vendor without even consulting him. It was a stall selling grilled meat on iron skewers, heat from the coals pushing back the cool September air in a three-meter radius. The vendor, a broad woman in her fifties with the forearms of someone who’d been working over open flames for decades, spotted Ashe and started assembling a parcel before Ashe had even opened her mouth.

“You’ve been here before,” Vane observed.

“Obviously.”

“How many times?”

“Enough that she knows my order.” Ashe paid, the vendor handed over the parcel, and Ashe deposited it into Vane’s arms with the complete ease of someone who’d never once questioned whether this was an appropriate distribution of labor.

He looked down at the warm parcel now resting in his arms.

“The honored guest,” Ashe said, already moving toward the next stall.

“You said that in Korreth.”

“It was true then too.”

The second stall was selling something from a large iron pot that smelled like the same spice blend Mara had been sourcing since the semester started. Ashe bought two portions and deposited one of them also into Vane’s arms. He was now carrying three items.

“I have two hands,” he pointed out.

“You have the spear harness on your back, a mid-Sentinel core, and water spine through the full chain. You can manage three food parcels.”

Fair enough.

She bought one more thing from a vendor selling something wrapped in broad leaves, but this time she put it in her own pocket rather than his arms. Vane registered this as a distinction she’d made deliberately and chose not to examine too carefully.

They walked deeper into the market. He was carrying three parcels while she had her hands free, navigating the crowd with the ease of someone who knew exactly where she was going. The market moved around them, all noise and heat and the particular energy of a working place in the middle of its day.

At some point, Vane became aware that he was calculating the market’s mana-vendor distribution against the island’s cultivator population as a resource allocation problem.

He stopped doing this immediately. He looked at the stalls instead. At the people. At Ashe ahead of him, moving through the crowd with the easy authority of someone who’d never once been uncertain about her right to occupy space.

She turned her head back. “You were calculating something.”

How did she always know?

“I was not,” he lied.

“You had the expression.” She looked forward again. “What was it?”

He sighed. “Resource allocation.”

“We’re at a market.”

“Yes.”

Ashe stopped walking. She turned around completely and looked at him with those red eyes, not performing any particular feeling. Just assessing him with that reading she applied to things she was evaluating.

Then she grabbed him by the sleeve of his jacket and walked him firmly toward a stall he hadn’t been heading toward. This one was selling fried dough dusted with what smelled like sugar and a spice he couldn’t immediately identify.

“One of those,” she told the vendor.

She took it, then held it out to him. He was still holding three parcels. She looked at this logistical situation, then held the fried dough between her teeth while she reorganized his arms to free one hand, transferred two parcels to her own arms without ceremony, and handed him the fried dough properly.

“Eat that,” she commanded.

He ate it. The dough was hot, the sugar sharp, and the spice underneath it something eastern that he didn’t have the vocabulary for. It was delicious.

She was already moving again with two of the parcels.

Somehow, they ended up on a roof.

Vane didn’t fully process how it had happened. She’d turned down a narrow path between two stalls, gone through a gap in a low wall, climbed an external staircase on the side of a storage building with the ease of someone who’d done it many times before. Then they’d crossed a storage platform, gone up a ladder, and arrived on a flat roof with a clear view of the lower district below and the Academy’s white stone above.

Ashe sat down on the roof’s edge with her legs folded, set the parcels between them, and looked at the island below.

Vane sat beside her, his heart doing something warm and complicated in his chest.

The view from here was completely different from the clock tower. The clock tower showed you the island’s geography, the tactical layout of everything. This showed you its life. The market below operated at full noise and heat, the smell of cooking and the sound of negotiation and the movement of a working place going about the middle of its day. Above them, the Academy sat on the hill with that specific quality it had from below, like it had grown out of the rock rather than been built on it.

Ashe opened one of the parcels and ate without preamble.

Vane opened another one. The spiced meat from the iron pot vendor. It was excellent. He ate and looked at the district below and tried, really tried, to just let the afternoon be the afternoon.

After a while, Ashe said, “You checked that water tower twice.”

Vane looked at the water tower on the district’s south edge. He had, in fact, been assessing its structural suitability for a specific type of positional drill that used elevated platforms. He hadn’t even been conscious of doing it.

“It has a good angle,” he said.

“For what?”

“A positional drill.”

She looked at the water tower. Then at him. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and her expression was doing something that wasn’t quite amusement and wasn’t quite exasperation. It lived somewhere between them.

“We’re not drilling today,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you looking at the water tower?”

“Reflex,” he admitted.

She accepted this, eating another piece of the grilled meat. Below them, the market produced its constant noise. A vendor was having an argument about price with a student in first-year whites who’d apparently underestimated the cost of something and was now experiencing the market’s correction of this assumption.

“What did you do,” Ashe asked suddenly, “when you had time with no purpose? Before all of this?”

Vane thought about this. The honest answer was that he hadn’t had time with no purpose in Oakhaven. Time in Oakhaven always had purposes. Find food. Collect what was owed. Maintain the arrangements that kept the operation functioning. The time he’d spent at the river outside the city when he was very small, before the operation existed and he was simply a child, had ended when he understood that the city didn’t allow for it.

“When I was six,” he said slowly, “there was a river about two miles outside Oakhaven. I went there twice. I tried to fish.”

Ashe looked at him, genuine interest in her expression.

“I never caught anything,” he continued. “I didn’t have enough patience to wait for it.”

She was quiet for a moment, processing this.

“You,” she said finally, and there was something almost incredulous in her voice.

“Yes?”

“You, who spent six months waiting for the correct moment. Who ran forms every morning for twelve weeks and found the fifth beat by not trying to find it. Who sat on an eastern compound wall for seven nights in a row.” She looked at him with those red eyes, intense and focused. “You didn’t have enough patience to fish?”

“I was six,” he protested weakly.

Ashe turned away. The corner of her mouth was doing that thing it did when something had struck the part of her she kept carefully protected and she’d decided not to manage it back. He could see the side of her face and the specific quality of what was happening in it.

Then she laughed.

It came out before she could decide anything about it. The real laugh, sharp and genuine and completely uncontrolled. She turned her head further away and looked at the district below while it ran its course, and Vane watched the side of her face while it happened.

This, he realized. Being the specific cause of the real laugh arriving before the management could catch it. This was what Valerica had meant about motion versus being still. He hadn’t produced anything. Hadn’t tried to be funny or clever. He’d just been present and honest, and the laugh had come because of that rather than despite it.

When Ashe turned back, the corner of her mouth hadn’t entirely resolved. She offered him something from the third parcel, the broad-leaf wrapped item she’d put in her own pocket at the market. He took it. It was dense and slightly sweet and warm from being in her pocket, and it was good in the straightforward way of something made to be eaten rather than to impress.

They ate together, the market moving below them in its endless rhythm.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep