will take me some time to make preparations,” he said. “I will need to speak with your husband and to do some research.”
“Of course,” Karanissa said. “Whatever is necessary.” She rose.
“Bring your husband and his other wife here this afternoon, and we will settle the details,” Gresh said, rising as well.
She bowed an acknowledgment.
He showed her to the door, then stood in the doorway watching her walk away down the street toward Eastgate Market.
She was a handsome woman, no question about it, and if her story was true, she was a woman with an incredible history. The task she had set him was going to be a challenge—stupendously profitable, he hoped—but a challenge.
In fact, he had no idea at all, as yet, of how he would do it.
That did not worry him. He would find a way. Various possibilities were already stirring in the back of his mind.
CHAPTER THREE
Gresh sat at his kitchen table across from Twilfa and Tira, stroking his short-trimmed beard. “She said they’d tried wizardry, theurgy, demonology, warlockry, science, and ritual dance. She didn’t mention witchcraft, but since she’s a witch herself I think we can take that for granted.”
“Then why did you want me here?” Tira asked.
“To see whether she was telling the truth,” Gresh replied. “Whether she’s really a witch and really as old as she claims.”
“But you let her go!”
“She’ll be back this afternoon.”
“You want me to stay here all day? Gresh, Dar and I have our own customers to attend to.”
Gresh sighed. “Are any of them coming today?”
“I’m not going to tell you my entire schedule.”
“I won’t keep you, then, but can you please come by this afternoon? Naturally, I will pay you for your time.”
Tira frowned.
“Tira, I’m sorry I dragged you over here for nothing, but I didn’t know how the conversation was going to go, and this way you’ll know what I want when you come back, and I won’t need to try to signal you surreptitiously. And you can tell me if you’ve ever heard of this Karanissa of the Mountains, or her husband Tobas of Telven, or a mirror that makes spriggans.”
Tira considered that for a moment, then relented. “Fine, I’ll be here this afternoon and will tell you whether they’re lying,” she said. “And I never heard of Karanissa or Tobas, but didn’t you say they were from the Small Kingdoms? I don’t know anyone there. The Sisterhood doesn’t operate openly there.”
“Thank you.”
“And you will indeed pay me my full consultation rate this afternoon.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want you thinking you can get a discount just because you’re my brother, or because you’re the famous Gresh the Supplier.”
“Of course not.”
“Good.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’ll be back this afternoon. If I have a chance, I might talk to a few people about this Karanissa.”
“Thank you,” Gresh replied. He and Twilfa watched silently as Tira straightened her shawl and marched out the back door. Except for Dina, his sisters almost always used the back door, at his request. He didn’t want anyone wondering why all these non-wizards were coming to his shop.
And they did come fairly often. His sisters were his most important trade secret. Oh, he had plenty of other sources and contacts, a network of agents scattered across the western half of the World, but his family was at the heart of his unique ability to acquire the things his customers sought. He had based his entire business on sisterly affection and sibling rivalry—what one sister could not find, another could, and would, because to refuse would be to disappoint their only brother and miss a chance to crow.
Gresh was only eight when he first realized he could play off Dina, who was then a freshly accredited journeyman wizard, against Difa, then an apprentice warlock, to his own benefit. He had known all along that Difa had originally intended to be a wizard and had only become a warlock because the possibility was new and exciting and as a warlock she would not be once again following in her older sister’s footsteps. Still, it was not until Dina made journeyman that Gresh had discovered he could exploit this rivalry, challenging each sister to show that she could do more with her magic than the other. Warlockry was still relatively new and unfamiliar at the time, which had helped—questions of which sort of magic was better at what had not yet all been settled.
Tira was already in her third year of apprenticeship then, and she, too, had joined the competition quickly enough. Chira and Pyata and Shesta joined in their turn. No two of Keshan the Merchant’s daughters chose the same school of magic—that would have been copying—but all were determined to demonstrate that their magic was best.
Then Gresh had reached apprenticeship age himself and faced the prospect of learning his own magic. Dina had not yet been ready for master’s rank, but she could have found him a place with a wizard somewhere.
Or Difa could have found a master warlock. Tira could probably have found a witch. The others were still apprentices themselves, but…
But it didn’t matter, because Gresh had decided he didn’t want to be a magician. It would have meant choosing one sort of magic—and one of his sisters—over all the others. Whichever school of magic he chose, the sister in that school would have deemed it a victory and the others a defeat; factional lines within the family that had always been fluid would become fixed.
He might have chosen a variety of magic that none of them had studied, which would have avoided choosing sides by rejecting all of them, but even at twelve he had been able to foresee a lifetime of being told, “You chose your magic instead of mine, so I can see you won’t want my help!” Although finding a magic none of his older sisters had chosen would have worked as far as not choosing sides at first, it ignored the question of what might happen when his younger sisters began choosing their apprenticeships.
No, there were too many potential complications with any school of magic. Appealing as learning magic might have seemed, he did not want to alienate any of his sisters, or choose one over the others. He liked being able to call on all of them.
So he had apprenticed to their father, which had made both their parents happy, and he had learned the merchant’s trade, learned bookkeeping and bargaining, buying and bartering—and he had made use of all his twelve sisters in his business, older and younger, from Dina the wizard to Ekava the seamstress, and had eventually taken on Twilfa, the youngest, as his assistant. Because of the family’s competitiveness no two had pursued exactly the same occupation, even after their contacts could no longer find new varieties of magic, and he now had available for consultation representatives of eight different schools of magic, as well as a seamstress, a sailor, and a guardswoman.
That didn’t include the husbands or children his sisters had acquired over the years—nine of the twelve were married, and three of them had offspring old
